


Never Twice the Same

by Jaelijn



Series: Bitter Days, and Sweet 'verse [2]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Gauda Prime, Post-Season/Series 02 AU, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Timestamp, Torture, in a way but really also actually not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-08-07 01:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 45,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16399190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn
Summary: The bid for Central Control has disastrous consequences. Avon is left trying to pick up the pieces.(This fic offers an alternative perspective on my PGP novelBitter Days, and Sweet. It will not make sense without having readBDaS. If you have - this is "River"'s story.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Bitter Days, and Sweet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11667354) by [Jaelijn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn). 



> As the summary says, this, finally, by readers' request, is River's story and perspective on events in _Bitter Days, and Sweet_. There are many "missing scenes" from the BDaS plotline in this story and I don't re-explain the premise, so it will not make any sense if you haven't read BDaS. Also feel like I should warn you that, frankly, BDaS is the happier fic. ;)
> 
> I will be posting in instalments, but some chapters are significantly shorter than others, so it might not be "just" a chapter a week. But, as always, the fic is fully finished, so no need to fear that it will be abandoned incomplete.
> 
> And now, enjoy!

“Blake!” Avon coughed, trying to clear the dust from his lungs and knowing that there was no point in even trying. “Blake, are you alive down there?”

Avon caught Jenna’s worried glance, looking down at him from a few steps up the ladder.

“I’m going back down.”

“Be quick! Tell Vila not to dawdle!”

Avon nodded and climbed back down the ladder. He had no wish to go back into the tunnel, further into Central Control-that-wasn’t, but they had all heard the explosion, and the dust hung heavy in the air. Something smelled burned. He needed to at least make sure… “Blake!” He coughed again, the dust making his eyes water. If he kept close to the wall, he could just about see where he was going.

Then, suddenly, painful and rough: “Avon.”

A moment later, Avon nearly fell over him. “What are you doing, Blake, we have to leave, now! Where is –?” It was then that he noticed the look on Blake’s face, ashen not because of the dust, and abruptly his mind went blank.

Blake’s hand clamped around his arm, holding him back. “There is no use. The security mechanism went off as the door closed. It discharged right through him.”

Avon pulled against his grip, but Blake was stronger than he was. “Let me go!”

“No! Leave it! Vila’s dead – we need to leave, now!”

Reluctant, Avon let himself be pulled, back to the ladder that would take them to the surface where they would teleport to safety. Blake let go of him at the foot of the ladder, after a coughing fit and a nod that seemed to mean something to Blake, even though Avon wasn’t sure what he had meant by it himself. Blake stayed behind him on the ladder and blocked the entrance once they were outside.

“Let’s go!” Blake told Jenna, who had her hand on her bracelet already.

“Where is Vila?” asked Gan.

“Vila’s dead,” Blake said.

The sentence still echoed in Avon’s head when they materialised in the teleport room. He brushed at the dust on his sleeve as he went to unclip the teleport bracelet. It wouldn’t come off.

Cally looked them over once, and the colour drained from her face. “I hoped I was wrong,” she said, stricken, and Blake glanced at her mutely, then Avon, then Gan.

“We need to get out of here, Blake,” Jenna said.

Blake nodded and started heading towards the flight deck with Jenna on his heels. “Yes. Anywhere. Just take us out. Avon, where are you going?”

Avon didn’t stop walking. “To change,” he said, not looking back to face them.

 

He stood in the shower for a long time. It was futile to hope the hot water might make him feel warm again. His shoulder ached – perhaps he had strained it, swinging on those bars, or perhaps it was simply remembered pain. Avon traced the old scar with his fingers and only succeeded in making himself feel colder. It was over a year since he had been shot, getting those visas, but there would always be a ragged scar. Somehow, it felt as though the wound should have reopened.

He left the shower eventually, fighting a blinding headache. He silenced the internal communications grid by pulling a few wires at random. Then, he retreated to bed where he lay for hours, unable to sleep.

He emerged eventually because the hunger pangs in his stomach were making him nauseous and he didn’t have anything edible in his cabin. It was only a short trip to the kitchen, but as he approached, he heard voices from within and slowed his steps.

“I want there to be something. I appreciate Blake’s words, but there should be something official,” Gan was saying. “A wake. Give him a decent send-off.”

Abruptly, the hunger was gone, leaving only the nausea behind.

“A party. Vila would have liked that,” Cally responded, her voice quiet and kind.

“I just didn’t think Avon would be such a heartless bastard about it. To not even bother turning up to Blake’s speech!” Gan had his back to the door, but Cally sat facing him and she had seen Avon there. Their gaze locked, even as Gan went on, “You’d think Vila was nothing but vermin to him. I know he doesn’t like me much, but if not even _Vila_ ’s death can get a reaction out of him–”

“Gan,” Cally said, stopping his rant, but Avon had already turned on his heel and was well on his way down the corridor when her telepathic call reached him: _Avon, wait!_

He didn’t.

 

Avon forced himself out of his cabin again late in _Liberator_ ’s night cycle, hoping to not meet anyone. He didn’t, until he was at the steps to the flight deck and Zen’s voice drifted out into the corridor.

“Do you require detailed sensor readings?”

“No.”

Blake. Avon stopped in the doorway.

“I asked for tolerable conditions. I assume that’s what you’ve given me.”

“Confirmed. There are gravitational anomalies which may affect movement.”

“And uninhabited.”

“The navigation computers list it as such.”

“That’s good enough.”

Blake was leaving, then, teleporting down on some planet – a planet that, from what Avon had heard from Zen, _he_ would not set foot on. But let Blake do whatever foolish thing he was planning to do. It hadn’t sounded like it involved any of them, and Avon could not bring himself to care. He’d come to the flight deck to work, but even with Blake there his gaze was drawn to Vila’s empty station and his stomach twisted, threatening to expel what little he had eaten. It was difficult to remember that it hadn’t been Avon’s fault, not this time. What right did Blake have to dwell on self-pity?

Blake nearly ran into him on his way out. “Avon. No comment?”

“Do as you like – as long as it doesn’t involve _me_.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Blake said with barely concealed hostility. “It doesn’t.”

Avon let him walk away, though he knew that Blake had expected more of an argument – his entire manner had suggested as much. He couldn’t let it concern him – better to keep his focus on the work. Only Blake had barely gone when Jenna appeared at the other entrance to the flight deck, calling his name. Exasperated, Avon turned and returned to his cabin.

He heard that Blake had gone and hidden through the communicator, which he had reluctantly fixed just to do… _something_. Avon didn’t react to the frantic calls. Let them do what they thought they must, believe Blake’s grand show of guilt and regret and self-pity. With Vila there, Avon might have had a chance to change their minds about their great and glorious leader, but Cally wouldn’t be easily swayed from the Cause, Gan disliked Avon more than he blamed Blake for Vila’s death, and Jenna… well, she might have an avaricious streak occasionally, but he had tried to get her to abandon Blake once and failed and he couldn’t summon the energy to try again.

There was still a heavy weight on his chest, chocking him.

Finally, when he got tired of them trying to call him, he sought refuge in the primary computer control. _It would be so easy_ , he thought, staring unseeingly at the blinking control lights. So easy to override Zen from here, take control of the ship. He had done it before – but instead of rerouting control back to the flight deck, he could put it all on this console. Make the ship leave, run. Drop the others off on a friendly enough planet, take the _Liberator_ and vanish. Vila had died for nothing, and if he didn’t leave now, there was a one in four chance that he would be next.

He was already opening the panel before he came aware that he’d made the decision.

 

“Step away from the console, Avon.”

At first, her voice barely registered, and when it did, Avon turned slowly – evidently too slowly for Jenna, who pushed him in the chest, crowding him back against one of the ceiling high computer banks, her gun pressed under his chin.

“What the hell were you doing?!”

“He’s going to get all of us killed,” he told her calmly, surprised at even finding his voice.

“Blake might be dying down on that planet already, if Cally can’t work the teleport! You make me sick, Avon.”

“Wake up, Jenna! Are you so blind to trust–”

“ _Blake_ hasn’t tried to steal the ship from under my nose. Nor did he intend on abandoning someone to certain death, just as certain as if you’d pulled the trigger!”

“Vila –”

“– died on Blake’s mission which we agreed to, knowing the risk! Even Vila!”

“ _Not_ the way the plan changed.”

“And now you’d kill Blake, too; and the rest of us? Put us out the airlock once we were on the way? I might not fully trust Blake, but I trust _you_ even less. Move, Avon, and keep your hands where I can see them.”

She herded him into a small storage bay at gunpoint, never letting her guard down. The door fell heavily into lock behind her. It was a mechanical door; not even Vila would have been able to move the bolt. Avon felt a jolt of fear when the lights went out, plunging him into total darkness. If Blake didn’t make it back, Jenna might just decide to forget about him – and if Blake did… well, perhaps it would be better for all of them if Blake decided to space him. He should have died a long time ago, anyway – back on Earth, before he could be foolish enough to fall in love again.


	2. Chapter 2

Blake, it turned out, made it back from his trip unscathed, but it was Cally that came to release Avon. By the time she did, the impenetrable darkness had crept into his mind. He told himself it was the sudden bright light that made his eyes water, wiping angrily at the tear tracks.

_Avon_. Her mental voice was oh so gentle. _Avon, will you stay?_

“You’ll all continue to be led by him, won’t you.” He didn’t need to make it a question.

“Yes. It is a worthwhile cause, Avon. We all knew and accepted the dangers.”

“ _I_ didn’t. _Vila_ didn’t.”

Infuriatingly, she laid a hand on his arm. _Will you stay? I would like for you to stay._

Avon thought of the detector shield he’d been working on, of Zen’s intricate design under his hands, of the beauty of the ship’s programming language and of Orac, and tried his damnest not to think of Vila and what remained of him. “Yes. I’ll stay. There’s nowhere else to go.”

 

Or perhaps there was.

Tynus owed him, more than enough for the damned crystal, enough, too, for hiding him. Q-base was out of the way, full of technicians – Avon would be able to blend in, so long as nobody recognised him on sight, and there were things that could be done – contact lenses, perhaps a beard…

“I don’t like you going down alone, Avon,” Cally told him as she set the teleport coordinates.

“I’ll be faster and more inconspicuous on my own. Put me down, Cally.”

He barely made it out alive.

Possibly he owed his life to Tynus’s poor aim – it certainly hadn’t been strategy that got him away from Fosforon. The fact that Tynus was dying down there now – was probably dead already, succumbing to a plague that overwhelmed the entire station – was hardly a consolation. If only he’d been awake to stop Blake from putting out that plague warning, they might have taken Servalan with them, but why should he be so lucky?

His shoulder hurt, and there would be a new scar instead of the old, as if the past could be so easily erased.

 

The wound had barely mended – the pain was only just bearable, but Avon refused to fog his mind with pain killers any longer. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move, it hurt to work, even when he was just typing at a console. But he was alive, and he wouldn’t lie passively in the medical unit or his cabin while Blake got all of them killed. They’d barely survived that last attack run – it seemed that the Federation had developed a detector screen of their own, and Avon’s had burned out in that last attack. He didn’t have the parts to fix it, let alone the dexterity. He could barely raise his arm enough to eat.

He was on the flight deck, trying to keep distracted, when the message came in. He ignored it – Orac was tasked with logging all messages, and it would be nothing but standard Federation chatter, anyway.

Only it wasn’t.

It was a trap, of course. Avon didn’t believe for a second that Travis really intended to join forces, and what did it matter if he killed the hostage – one more death, one more sacrifice for Blake’s Cause couldn’t make much of a difference, not if it saved their lives.

But Blake wasn’t swayed. “That’s why I want to go to Exbar. I don’t expect any of you to come with me, I just want you to put me down, that’s all.”

What nonsense – more noble heroics, just as Blake’s grand show of guilt.

“You just want us to put you down and that is all you ask?” Cally put in – but she couldn’t possibly believe – or did she?

“Yes.”

“Well, if that’s all…” Jenna.

Avon had heard enough. “You’re being naïve, all of you. Vila?” The word was out before he realised what he had done. Deafening silence thundered down on the flight deck. Avon stared at the space where the thief should have been, would never be again. Vila might have agreed with him, or he might not; it hadn’t always been easy to tell with Vila. But there had been a chance, there had been someone else with – occasional, granted, but still there – common sense on board this ship of idealists and now there wasn’t.

“If I can do something to save Inga’s life, I will,” Blake said, very quietly.

“Right,” Gan said.

“No!” Avon couldn’t bring himself to turn back to face them. “I still say that it is an unacceptable risk.”

“It is not unacceptable because _I_ accept it,” Blake snapped, and Avon just barely kept himself from flinching. His shoulder was radiating pain all down his back and arm at the tension.

“I want to save that girl, if I can,” Blake went on, still sounding incensed. “If I can’t I might as well be a Federation slave like everyone else. As might you all.”

Avon heard him stride out. There was a long silence.

Jenna was the first to move, stepping up to her console. “Zen, lay in a course for the planet Exbar.”

 

He hesitated for a long time, his hand hovering over the controls for so long that his shoulder was beginning to spasm. He could sabotage the ship again, but someone would probably stop him. But this… It would be dangerous – it might be dangerous. For Blake, if he took too long – for them all if the others couldn’t bring themselves to abandon him. If the Federation didn’t get there before them – but they would, they must – wouldn’t they? But the idea that Travis only wanted to talk, that he might want to join forces was ludicrous. At worst, it was a Federation trap anyway. At best, Travis really _was_ a fugitive – but he would always remain Blake’s enemy. Better to get rid of one of them while they could, and Blake would never do it.

Avon sent the message.

 

“I’m going down.”

He was met with pure disbelief on Jenna’s face. “What!”

“I said I’m going down. Cally, will you operate the teleport?”

“I don’t believe this,” Jenna said.

“Why?” Cally asked simply. Avon wasn’t sure how much she knew – how much she had guessed. Something, at any rate.

“Blake may need some help.” It sounded thin even to his own ears.

“But you’ve been against it all until now,” Jenna said – surprising, really, that _she_ hadn’t volunteered to go with Blake.

“Your shoulder is still healing, Avon,” Cally said.

He shrugged them both off. “I know, but I’m still going down. Cally?”

She followed him to the teleport and took her place behind the console while he fastened the bracelet onto his wrist.

“Why do you feel responsible, Avon?” she asked. He didn’t give her an answer. What was there to say?

 

He might have blacked out when he was pulled off balance – certainly by the time he fully came to himself, the undignified net was only tangles about his legs and his wrists had been bound. The teleport bracelet was dangling in the crimo’s hand. Avon could barely breathe, or he might have run for it – but they were adequately equipped with oxygen masks, and every one of Avon’s breaths hurt.

They dragged him off none too gently, shoving him into a tower-like building, where – to no astonishment of his – he received confirmation that Ushton had betrayed them. He could see Blake through the window of a door in the rear and tore his gaze away. One of the crimos forced him into a chair, yanking him back by the shoulder. Avon couldn’t conceal his gasp.

Travis immediately leant over him, getting uncomfortably close. “Well, Avon? A bad shoulder?”

“Go to hell.”

“Oh, I expect I will join you there, eventually.” Travis’s hand landed heavily on Avon’s injured shoulder. “But first you will give me the _Liberator_.”

Avon bared his teeth. “No.”

Behind him, Blake was shouting, his voice muffled to unintelligibility by the thick material of the door.

Travis jerked his head at one of the crimos. “Cut off his oxygen.”

Avon didn’t see him do it, but Travis was so close that he could feel his breath on his face. He jerked back, more as a test than anything else, and Travis’s hand immediately tightened – and kept on tightening.

“Activate the bracelet,” Travis said.

Avon shook his head, trying to clear the black spots dancing before his vision. The pain was incredible; the bionic hand tightening like a vice, implacable, inhuman force tearing into his muscles, pressing against his collarbone. Then, abruptly, the pressure eased, allowing him to draw a shaky breath – only for Travis to clamp his fist shut again, stronger than before. With a sickening crack, the collarbone broke and Avon screamed.

His awareness narrowed to a pinprick of light for a while afterwards – impossible to tell how long. He was faintly conscious of Blake’s voice, then small, female hands shifting his arm into a first-aid sling. The pain receded a little after that, and, finally, reality returned, though it remained fuzzy at the edges.

The girl – Inga – was moving around him, and a moment later, Blake and Ushton came through the door.

“Avon, are you all right?”

“I’ll survive.” Avon took a few shallow breaths. “Did you kill him?”

“No. We’ll leave him for Servalan. We need to get you up to the ship.”

Avon couldn’t remember whether he’d agreed – his next conscious memory was of waking up in his cabin, propped up on several pillows, his arm immobilised in one of _Liberator_ ’s slings – it would speed up the healing process and reduce the pain, but with an injury like this is would still take time. At least he wasn’t confined to the medical unit again, as much as he disliked other people intruding into his cabin.

“Avon, how do you feel?”

He turned his head to look at Cally, wishing he couldn’t see the concern in her eyes. “I’ve been better,” he told her and went back to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I edited the tags to add a few warning-style ones that really should have been there from the start - apologies about that - but they become especially relevant soon. You have been warned.
> 
> Also, a fair bit of the dialogue here should sound familiar.

Cally had tried to convince Blake that it was too soon – that they needed time to recover. Even Gan objected. He had stopped throwing dark glares at Avon at some point in the last weeks – possibly the pale spectre that greeted Avon when he looked into the mirror had something to do with the crew’s tiptoeing around him. He’d switched out the restrictive sling for a lighter support a few days ago, but he couldn’t exactly claim to be at his best. He hadn’t been at his best since Vila’s death, but Avon was happy enough to let them think it was merely the strain of the injury from Exbar.

Avon didn’t argue Blake’s plan. Urgent calls for help from a place they were going to anyway were hard to ignore, impossible for Blake. They were going to Albian _now_ , whether anyone liked it or not.

“I will be going down,” Blake said, “Cally?”

She nodded. “Yes, all right.”

Blake hesitated, his gaze skittering uneasily towards Avon.

“I’ll go,” Avon said, knowing, for once, what Blake was thinking. “It could be a warzone. We need Jenna on board and Gan can’t fire a gun.”

“Your arm…” Blake began.

“The left. _I_ can still fire a gun.”

Blake looked sceptical, but nodded. He knew he didn’t have a choice, not if they were going at all.

 

The probe clattered from his fingers, suddenly nerveless, his mind wiped blank with the exception of an emphatic _No_. It couldn’t be – he was dead, just like his sister. Avon hadn’t thought of Anna in weeks – the new grief far more immediate, far rawer. It was a debt he intended to pay, someday, but not now, when he wasn’t sure whether staying on _Liberator_ might not be a way to make Vila’s death mean something. _Foolish heroic gestures? How very unlike you, Kerr_ , an echo of hers and Vila’s voice murmured in his mind. They both seemed to call him by his first name in his mind, even though neither of them had in life. Avon _didn’t_ wish they had.

“What’s the matter?” Blake.

Avon blinked, bringing his attention back to the present. “Nothing. It’s not important. I was a little surprised, that’s all.”

Blake obligingly bent down and handed him back the dropped probe. “Why? Do you know him?”

“I once knew somebody called Del Grant, but it was a long time ago.” Was it? It felt like a lifetime, but it had been… oh, two years, now, nearing three? “I doubt that this is the same man.”

“You don’t seem very eager to find out. Why?” Just like Blake, never knowing when to leave well enough alone.

“There are matters that remain to be settled between us,” Avon said. He understood Grant – had always understood Grant; he had blamed himself, too, after all. But now, it felt rather as though he was in Grant’s shoes. Perhaps Jenna should be grateful that Avon hadn’t gone about outright threatening to kill Blake.

“Like what?” Blake insisted.

“I told you; it’s not important.”

“If it is not important, then why did his name have such a strong effect upon you?”

“Because the Del Grant I knew said that if we ever met again, he would kill me.” Avon grabbed the probe tighter and inhaled. “I should see to that safe.”

Blake, finally, seemed to be ready to drop the subject and followed him over. “Can you do it?”

Avon studied the lock, trying very hard not to think. “Yes, give me a little time.”

“Time is running out,” Blake said, and Avon wanted very much to make him shut up.

“I can work or I can talk,” he told him and added, feeling nasty, “I’m not Vila, Blake.”

That, finally, shut him up.  

 

It _was_ Del, of course, because Fate didn’t seem inclined to spare Avon, of late.

It didn’t help to have Del hovering over his shoulder as he worked on the safe, but Avon had needed a second hand and Blake and Cally had gone to help search for Provine.

“What happened to your arm?” Grant asked, as if that was the most important thing.

“An old friend,” Avon said, not quite truthfully. He didn’t want to bring up the Federation and their interrogation techniques. He fused a final wire. “Step back, I’ll have to blow this bit up.”

They retreated to the table where the detonator stood, and Avon pressed the remote trigger. With a loud bang, the safe sprang open. Grant immediately hurried over, pulling out hardcopy files. “Personality records. These will tell us what Provine looks like!”

Avon tried to work the tension out of his hand, staring bleakly at the countdown. Over two thirds of their time gone. “What about the bomb?”

“A bunch of coded files.” Del passed them on and Avon glanced over them.

“I could decode them, but we don’t have the time.” He touched his bracelet, another action made awkward by having his arm strapped to his chest. “Cally.”

“What is it, Avon?”

“I need you to teleport up, get Orac to decode these files for us.”

“I’ll be right there.”

With Cally gone, there was nothing to do but to talk to Grant.

“I said I’d kill you,” Grant began, always straightforward. Entirely unlike his sister, in that way. Anna had been… oh, Anna had been so complex.

“Don’t let me stop you. Blake might try, though.”

Grant glared, and Avon avoided his gaze.

 _Who is the coward now, eh, Vila?_ He dragged in a breath. “That last day, when it was all over, did they hurt her?”

Grant’s eyes were flaming – perhaps there was something of his sister in him, after all. “They kept her under interrogation for nearly a week. They tried everything but she never broke. If she had spoken, told them what they wanted to know, she’d be alive now.”

It was probably true. No such _if_ s for Vila. “She should have told them.”

“She held on because she believed in you. She didn’t know that you’d run out and leave her to face it alone.”

Avon felt a muted flare of anger. He hadn’t been able to summon up the energy for real anger for weeks. “That was not the way it was.”

“I know exactly how it was. She died under Federation torture. But it was you who killed her.”

There was a chime – a teleport bracelet. Avon glanced up to find Blake in the doorway, not knowing whether he should be grateful for the interruption or annoyed that Blake had plainly been listening.

 

The cold was penetrating, piercing even through the thermal suit. There was no time to waste. Avon took his bracelet off and held his hand out for Grant’s.

“What are you doing?”

“Blake will pull us out in ten minutes. You know as well as I do that that’s not enough time.”

“And you’ll risk it?” Grant unclipped the bracelet, then went back to the search. “Didn’t know you had a death wish.”

“Do you?”

“It’s what these people are paying me for.”

Avon followed a relay cable and pushed a panel to the side. “Down here, Grant. There’s a layer of solid ice – heat up a lance. There’s no time to try the axe.”

“There’s mercury in that detonator. You burn your way in, you could trigger it,” Grant said, but he was already moving.

“I know,” said Avon simply and sat back on his heels, waiting for the lance to heat.

“There’s one thing I never understood,” Grant went on, almost conversationally, “Why did you leave her alone?”

Avon stared down at the layer of ice, knowing that he couldn’t will it to thaw and still wishing that he could. “I had arranged to buy some exit visas, but I had to go right across the city to collect them. It was safer for Anna to stay out of sight.”

Grant passed him the lance and a visor. “What happened then?”

“The man from whom I was buying the visas increased the price; he said he could get even more if he turned me in and collected the Federation reward.” Avon set the lance onto the ice, and for a while neither of them spoke. Finally, with a jolt that made Avon’s skin crawl, expecting, for a moment, to have triggered the explosion, the ice broke. “Done it. Get that table under the light; and give me a hand.”

“Don’t be foolish, you can’t carry it with one arm. You get the table.”

Conceding the point, Avon stood and did so. Grant heaved the device out and onto the table, and they both breathed a sigh at the countdown, still ticking remorselessly down.

“Well, while it’s ticking we’re all right,” Grant said.

“We’re going to have to take out the relays to get at the activator. Get the cutters.” Avon ran his hand over the side of the bomb, trying to find a shortcut. There wasn’t one. After a moment’s consideration, he unclipped the sling holding his arm, stretching the muscles carefully. It hurt, of course, but they would be cutting it fine even if he had both hands to do the work. With just one…

“What are you doing?” Grant asked.

“Working.” Gingerly, Avon freed the relay wires. “Which one is it first?”

“Centre, then right – no, no wait! Centre, then left. Your left.”

“You don’t get another guess.”

“Centre, then left,” Grant shot back, voice icy.

Avon held his breath and made the cuts. The countdown kept on ticking, mercilessly nearing the 50 mark.

“You should have killed him,” Grant said, already running a laser probe along the cover of the device to lay open the mechanism, not bothering with the screws. 

“I did – it wasn’t that straightforward. The dealer was expecting something and fired first. I started back but I was losing a lot of blood.” Avon rolled his shoulder, trying to relax the stiff muscles. It wasn’t ill-remembered pain, not this time, but it might as well have been.

Grant was removing the cover, pulling out part of the incendiary mechanism.

“Don’t let it tilt, keep it level.”

Grant’s lips quirked, for the first time since they’d met here on Albian. “Must be getting old.”

“Waste any more time and you won’t get any older.” Avon stepped in where Grant had been, pushing a separator between the wires. “Link clamp.”

Grant slapped it into his hand with more force than was necessary – or perhaps he had meant for it to hurt. “Why didn’t you get back to her?”

“Somewhere along the way I passed out. I was lucky. Some people found me and got me under cover.”

“You could have got a message to her, told her to get out.”

“I was _unconscious_ for more than thirty hours. When I used the visas to get out of the city, it was a week later. Anna was already dead.” His hand was starting to shake. “Get your hands in here. I need to hold this flap back.”

Grant stepped up close, taking the link clamp from Avon’s hand. “You’re shaking.”

“I know.” Avon gritted his teeth and felt for the main connection.

Grant was staring down at their hands, but he wouldn’t be able to see any more than Avon did. “You’re lying. You left the city the same day, before the Federation found Anna. You could have got her out.”

Avon twisted his shoulder, trying to free the wire. It would have been uncomfortable in any situation, now the old injury burned, stealing his breath. “No,” he forced out. “She came looking for me, the patrols found her. It was only after we got word that she was dead that I left.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Not particularly. But it happens to be the truth.” His fingers slipped on the wire and Grant froze in tension. “If there had ever been a time,” Avon went on, almost despite himself, “when I could have given my own life to save her, I would have done it. The only grain of… consolation that I have is that Anna knew that.” It was more than Vila ever did – Vila had died, probably not even knowing that Avon considered him a friend, a kindred soul aboard the _Liberator_ , not that Avon could have acknowledged it then. Regret burned bitterly in his throat.

“She died because of you, that’s all that matters,” Grant iced. His hand felt hot against Avon’s, his own skin numb and cold. “There’s nothing changed between us.”

Avon thought of Blake, of Blake’s Cause, and knew that he was fooling himself if he thought he could bear it any longer, as if it could give Vila’s death any meaning. Oh yes, he understood Grant, understood only too well. “I didn’t really expect that it would be,” he said and desperately tucked at the wire before pain could numb his fingers entirely.

Miraculously, it came loose. They both exhaled, tension falling.

“That’s the primary isolated,” Avon said, pulling back his hand. He tucked it in towards his chest, trying to ease the pain – failing.

“Did you see the read-out?” Grant asked.

“I did.” Below 50, now.

“We’re running it very fine. There’s a long way to go.” Receiving no response, Grant looked up to glare at him. “I said, there’s a long way to go.”

“I heard.” Avon made himself move, but his hands wouldn’t still. “You’ll have to do it, remove the detonators.”

“Right.” Grant inserted his laser probe into the mechanism, cutting the fastenings. “You’re trembling. You should find a heater.”

It wasn’t cold that made Avon shiver, but he nodded anyway, eyes fixing on a heating grid, then travelling onwards, to a switch on the wall. “I see it. Keep working.” He dialled the heating up to maximum – too warm for comfort, but by the time the room had heated up, they’d be dead or done, anyway. When he turned around, Grant was lifting the central detonator from the casing, balancing it between two hands and setting it down on the table.

Avon couldn’t have done it. He barely felt his left arm.

“This isn’t familiar to me,” Grant said, an edge creeping into his voice.

Avon came back to his side. “It’s a new mark, but the principle is the same. Three detonators, each activated by a plunger. If we enlarge these holes and then insert a rod, we can arrest the downward travel of each plunger.”

“Do we have the time?”

“Not if we stand around talking.” Avon picked up the drill, then passed it on to Grant.

He took it, weighing it carefully. “A laser lance would be faster.”

“It’s too risky on this kind of material.”

There was a groan above them, water dripping down. Avon looked up, Grant following suit.

“The ceiling beam’s cracked.”

“It’s resting on the ice. We won’t be here long enough for it to make a difference. Start working.”

Grant enlarged the holes, holding his hand out for one of the rods. “I don’t suppose you have a second drill.”

“No. Ready?”

Grant nodded. “Release the trigger.”

The plunger dropped and was stopped by the rod.

Avon allowed himself a small smile.

“One down, two to go.”

Avon glanced at the countdown – nearing twenty. “We won’t be able to do it one by one. We’ll have to chance it.”

“I thought you only had the one drill.”

“Yes, I do.” Avon lifted the small laser lance. “How steady are your hands?”

“Give it here.” Grant took the lance, setting it against the holes. “Ready?”

Avon nodded, hefting the drill and inserting it against the openings in the third cylinder. “Ready.”

Grant switched the lance on and immediately off again, holding his breath. The plunger wobbled. “It’s no good.”

“It the _only_ way.”

“The cylinder’s cracked, Avon. We’ll have to do it with the drill or not at all.” He took the rods from Avon’s shaking hand. “It was a good try. Get out. You haven’t got time; nobody’s going to blame you.”

Avon pressed his lips together, finishing the second hole.

“I would have left you,” Grant said, “if I didn’t have any obligations to these people, I would have left. Why are you staying?”

“The rod, Grant!”

Grant moved, pushing the short piece of metal into the cylinder. Avon stared grimly at the cracked cylinder. A lower drill speed…

Suddenly, Grant’s hand clamped around his left arm, fastening the teleport bracelet.

“What are you doing!?”

“There is no time! Anna wouldn’t want both of us dead!”

Even if Avon had had the strength to wrench his arm free, the teleport beam took them before he could try.

He stared at Grant, once they materialised on the _Liberator_ , reading the defeat that was slowly creeping up his spine in Del’s face. He tore the teleport bracelet off savagely, hurting no one but himself. “Congratulations, Blake,” he snapped, not caring that Blake, ash-white, looked as though he’d punched him in the face. “Another six million dead for your Cause.”

“That was uncalled for, Avon,” Cally said, her voice calm but cold.

“Was it?” Avon pivoted on the stairs to stare back at them. “If Vila had been alive to open that safe we might have done it.”


	4. Chapter 4

That was the end of it.

It wouldn’t have needed Gan to corner him in a corridor just to punch him in the face – though Avon almost welcomed the pain. The punch had sent him to the floor, where his shoulder wouldn’t let him support himself, and Avon was sure Gan would have hit him again, if Grant hadn’t rushed around the corner and fallen into his arm.

“What are you doing!?”

Gan looked murderous. He might not have been able to fire a gun, but his limiter was evidently only now cutting in. “How dare you, Avon? You never even _cared_ for Vila! How dare you use him for cheap shots against Blake!”

Avon dapped at his split lip and said nothing.

“All right, Gan, _I’ll_ handle him,” Grant said.

Miraculously, Gan backed down and, with a thunderous scowl, walked off.

Grant sighed, turned and offered Avon a hand up. “Somehow, this isn’t how I imagined the _Liberator_.”

Avon knew better than to ask what he had imagined. “It doesn’t matter.” He keyed open his cabin, waving Grant inside. “I’m leaving.”

“Are you? Where to?”

“Wherever they drop you off, to begin with. After that…” Avon trailed off, pouring himself a drink and then, on second thought, another one for Grant.

“This Vila lad…” Grant hedged.

Avon tensed up, despite himself. He couldn’t talk about Vila with _Grant_. “A thief and damned good one.”

“I see,” Grant said and took the glass.

Avon avoided his gaze. He had no desire to know how much Grant _did_ see. They had known each other very well, once. “I’m going after Anna’s murderer,” he said instead, tracing the rim of his glass with a finger. His lip ached, but he didn’t taste any more blood.

“What!”

“Orac tracked him down, the torturer who killed her. I wanted to do it once the _Liberator_ was mine, but that won’t happen before we’re all dead, so I’m leaving.” He couldn’t do anything to bring her back to life – bring them both back to life, and for Vila he couldn’t even take revenge. It wasn’t Blake personally who had killed him, and even at his most frustrated, Avon could see that Blake’s Cause, at its very core, was too important to kill. No, let them go on. One way or another, if he went after Shrinker, it would be over for him.

“I’m coming with you,” Grant said.

Avon looked up. “Don’t be a fool. It’s a suicide mission. Even with the _Liberator_ it would have been risky.”

“Well, all the better if you don’t go alone. I’m not doing it for _you_ , Avon.” Grant smiled wryly, lifting his glass. “But I want you to succeed. For Anna.”

Avon nodded and returned the toast. “For Anna.”

 

Avon made Orac run a few more searches for him before they left, including pulling Vila’s Federation file. Orac protested the order to erase it after it’d saved it onto a datacube for Avon on principle, but it did it, in the end. Avon had the vague suspicion that Orac didn’t acquiesced because it believed Avon’s argument that it was better if the Federation wasn’t able to boast with getting one of Blake’s crew, but Orac was a machine, in the end. It was foolish to interpret sentiment into its actions. More foolish, still, that Avon would miss Orac and Zen – the two most advanced computers in the known universe, and he, a computer specialist, was turning his back on them.

But there was nothing for it. Gan held on to open hostility; Avon’s relationship with Blake, and therefore with Jenna, was strained to the breaking point. Only Cally seemed to really want him to stay – as a person, not just as the only one who really understood the _Liberator_ ’s systems. One more mission, and one more mission, and one more mission, and sooner rather than later he would be dead.

And if he died while trying to find Shrinker – well, then at least he’d been doing something _he_ had wanted to do, risking his life for something that mattered to _him_. One last order to Orac – to corrupt the database of the prison they would target, so that there was no chance of Avon being recognised, not even if it took them months to even get there – and they were off.

Blake put them down on a planet with a busy spaceport where they easily vanished into the crowd. Avon had grown out his beard, to give himself some anonymity – Del, as mercenary, moved in that strange grey area that the Federation tolerated, as long as he didn’t develop a reputation for only helping anti-Federation causes, which he hadn’t – yet. Avon didn’t quiz him on his morality, but Grant had little more cause to love the Federation than Avon, and for the same reason.

They destroyed the teleport bracelets in the first night – no difficulty with Avon’s expertise. It was simply too risky to keep them, so they took them apart, saved whatever bits could be sold without raising suspicion as to where they had come from, and pulverised the rest. The next day, they found an open-access computer terminal. Avon tested his backdoor linkup with Zen – just in case he ever needed to find the _Liberator_ again – and then Grant used his funds to buy them, entirely legally, a ship.

It was second hand, of course, and would need some repairs, but it would be best in the long run to have a legally obtained and registered vessel. It would take them months to get to where they were going, but unless they did something really stupid, no Federation vessel would bother them. They had their hands full controlling the free traders and wouldn’t waste time on a private ship that plainly wasn’t carrying cargo.

They obtained the necessary replacement parts and left that same day – better to be away if someone had picked up the _Liberator_ on quick approach and wondered what she had done in the system; besides, there was no reason to linger. Del was as passably competent a pilot as Avon remembered, not unlike himself, and set them underway.

“Kerr,” Del said, and Avon looked up from the scanner scope he’d been staring at. The first names were part of their disguise, something they needed to get used to while they could afford to make mistakes. Del was a shockingly common name, and while Kerr was rarer, it wasn’t enough to raise suspicion, not any more than Roj would have. Avon, on the other hand…

“I’ll take a look at that synthesiser,” Del went on. “You’ll keep an eye out?”

Avon nodded and moved over to take the pilot’s seat. He missed the space of the _Liberator_ – but he would survive the month or two cooped up with Grant. They’d part ways after that, anyway, and perhaps Avon could find an out-of-the-way world to settle down on – to hide.

He spent the first days meticulously going through the records Orac had saved for him, learning everything he could about Shrinker, about the prison facility and its personnel, about Anna’s arrest and _unfortunate_ death under interrogation, about his own arrest, trial and deportation. It was unappetising reading, but it was essential research and served the additional purpose of giving him time to work up the nerve to look at Vila’s file.

It still made him, quite literally, sick when he finally did.

Grant leant in the door of the washroom when Avon finally dared look up and sink down to sit against the bulkhead, heaving for breath.

“A fault in the synthesisers?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption; they’d had difficulties with the food synthesiser from the moment they’d set out. Easy to lie to Grant and waste time “adjusting” the device, but Avon didn’t feel like it. So, instead, Avon shook his head and swallowed dryly, rolling his shoulders to ease the tension. His left was still stiff; Avon suspected that it had been damaged too often and too thoroughly for even the _Liberator_ to fix. The scar tissue was impressive, at any rate, but to have it reduced would have been a waste of time and funds. Avon wasn’t that vain. “Unpleasant reading.”

“Some reading that must have been.” Grant came over, offering him a helping hand.

Avon let himself be pulled to his feet and leant on the sink, splashing water into his face. “It was.”

How had Vila done it? How had he preserved any shred of personality, anything at all after what they had done to him? Had done to him again and again and again? Avon had told himself that he was reading the file to be prepared – he had known Vila had been through the kind of torture they submitted common criminals to, not politicians like Blake, and while Avon had his own experiences, they hadn’t been extensive. He hadn’t resisted, and after a while they had lost interest, though they persisted longer than they should have, considering that he had confessed fully. Something about political motives – which hadn’t been there, not then. The irony might have choked him.

But no. He had wanted to learn about Vila, having lost the means to ask him. He had always known that Vila was cleverer than he pretended to be – no one who lacked intelligence could engage in verbal sparring with Kerr Avon and not always come out the loser. How had Vila preserved that wit, that unusual way of thought after the Federation had done everything to force him to conform?

Avon tensed his hand to a fist. It would have been too much of a coincidence to find that Shrinker had been involved in Vila’s interrogations, but people like him had been. People like him had done unspeakable things to his thief, and somehow Vila had beaten them all. Avon couldn’t congratulate Vila on it, but he could make at least one Federation torturer pay.

“This is about him, isn’t it?” Grant asked, as they returned to the small flight deck together. The autopilot was handling things – better quality than they had expected to get; their deep space flight had been quiet. Calmer than Avon was used to from the _Liberator_ , at any rate.

Avon settled into the second chair, leaving Grant the pilot’s position, and sighed. “Del…”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I didn’t see it until he was dead. Anna… it was too soon. I don’t even know if anything would have ever come from it, had Vila survived.”

“Did the Federation kill him, too?”

“In a way. He died in Central Control, on Earth.”

Grant’s eyes grew wide. “You took on Central Control?”

“It’s not there. There is nothing there but an empty room and a lot of nasty security systems. We came to Albian to find out where they had moved it.”

Grant’s face hardened.

Avon didn’t give it time to stir up their mutual regret and recriminations. “Vila had plenty of run-ins with Federation interrogators.” He laid a hand on the reader, where the file was still open and there was the usual unflattering prison snapshot of Vila. “I don’t think he would object to our plan.”

“For both of them, then,” Grant said, and when Avon met his gaze, it gleamed with resolve.

 

It went wrong.

Everything went wrong, like a stack of credit chips, unbalanced, sliding inexorably sideways to crumble in ruins at his feet, where it dissolved to ashes. Avon wanted nothing more than to follow the imaginary credits into oblivion, perhaps there the world would make final, fatal sense.

Del Grant was bitterly silent, staring fixedly at the view screen.

Avon tore his gaze away. He couldn’t look at him without seeing Anna, and it hurt indescribably. He had been such a fool.

How much of her had been real? The Anna Avon had seen clearly hadn’t been all that different from the Anna Del had known – but neither of them could have been real. Central Security’s top agent. Oh, Del had been betrayed, too, but Avon found it difficult, just then, to look past his own pain. The one person he had trusted, above all others, had worked for the Federation – had been one of the very people responsible for what had happened to Vila, what had happened to Blake – what had happened to him, after his arrest. She had let him risk his life, had let her torturers loose on him, had let him think that she loved him, that they could have a future together. If he had attempted the fraud without Anna, he might be safe and rich by now – but no, he wouldn’t have done it without her. He’d done it, in large parts, _for_ her.

_Fool_.

Avon didn’t know how they had got out of the rebel camp after he had shot – his mind shied away even from that memory.

He should have known better. Shouldn’t have followed up on Shrinker’s dying babbling about Bartholomew, about Chesku. Shouldn’t have contacted the rebellion on Earth for help, shouldn’t have gone back to Earth at all. Anna would be just as dead, but at least he would have had something. Now, he had nothing at all.

“Avon,” Grant said suddenly, his voice hard and cold. “We will part ways.”

“Yes.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning note for allusions to alcohol/drug misuse.

Another neutral spaceport, another anonymous mass of faces. After Grant had gone, Avon got mindlessly drunk, not particularly caring whether he gave himself away to any Federation spies – they might kill him, and he would have welcomed it. He was still weak from the torture he’d endured; a second round would be enough to finish him. Somehow, nobody noticed him.

Eventually, he woke from the stupor without the immediate desire to go right back to drinking away money he didn’t have. At least, he thought, Shrinker was dead, as he forced himself out of the bed that barely deserved the term and over to the painfully slow computer console that was standard for even the most run down of hotel rooms.

There was also a terrible hangover, a headache so bad that, when he called up the news and read of an intergalactic war, he thought for a long moment that he was hallucinating. But no, it was quite real.

Avon didn’t dare use the console to link up to _Liberator_ and find out what was going on. He left a worm in the system, something Orac might find, and then hacked his way into the poorly protected hotel account and lifted what money he would need to buy a ship and immediately did so.

It was an old, nameless, broken down Wanderer Class, but it had a Mark 2 engine – not quite the speed of a pursuit ship, certainly not the speed of the _Liberator_ , but the next best thing. The life support was defunct, there were no synthesisers and no food in storage, and the navigation computer wasn’t programmed to handle the speed of the drive.

It took him nearly four weeks to get it off the ground, and by then he was afraid that his thefts for funds to buy parts were becoming too conspicuous – they had made the news, at any rate, but the war was sweeping across the outer planets, spreading seemingly unchecked, along with horror stories of shapeshifting aliens. Hot on its heels came other stories – the Federation increasing its control on the worlds it still held, to keep its residents safe from the terror of the aliens, or so the propaganda channels said. Avon found other news, too, almost a footnote in the general chaos – reports of his death, dated to around the time when he had allowed them to torture him to get to Shrinker. Evidently, _someone_ had identified him, after all. The rumour suited him fine; it was little and late – perhaps it was the cause he hadn’t been picked up during his attempts to drink himself into oblivion, which, as best as he could tell, had lasted about a week. No longer on the wanted list, the bounty hunters that frequented this forsaken planet wouldn’t be interested in someone who happened to look like a recently deceased terrorist.

Avon wondered briefly whether Blake believed the rumour – whether the _Liberator_ was still out there at all. There had been no news, one way or another, but when he had tried to establish a link with Zen, it had failed. Avon was inclined to blame that on the inadequate flight computer in the Wanderer, but there was nothing from Orac, either – either his tracing programme hadn’t caught Orac’s attention yet, or it and the _Liberator_ were gone. Destroyed in the war?

He had to find out; there was nothing else for him to do, and he found that he was too angry to just die. He wished, futilely, that Vila were there, to tell him how it was possible to pick up the pieces of oneself and carry on, as Vila had done, not once, but several times over.

As depressing as the thoughts were, the immediate desire to turn to drinks or drugs had fled, too, chased away by the need to be able to concentrate on the work and by a strange, chittery fear that seemed to have settled into his heart never to leave. Avon had never claimed to be fearless – he wasn’t stupid, and the memory of Federation torture was too recent. He had been afraid then, terribly afraid, but resolve had carried him through. Now, he wasn’t sure how he had ever been able to summon such resolve. Now, it was just a question of there being no other option, nothing else to do.

Avon didn’t know what he would do if he found that the _Liberator_ was gone.

 

Getting the Wanderer off the ground nearly killed him, an energy leakage causing a fire in the engine that he barely managed to extinguish. He only just fixed the damage in time before the ship became abruptly, brutally and very permanently reacquainted with the planet. Avon was frankly too surprised to still be alive to think about what course to set for a long while, except that he needed to stay away from the core of Federation power – he’d rather take his chances with the mysterious aliens. When he managed to finally think, it occurred to him that, depressingly, he had no idea where to go.

Bitterly, he tried and retried to establish a link with Zen, failed and failed again. He went to ration the small amount of food supplies, wondering whether he should bother to restock if he hadn’t found the _Liberator_ when they ran out. He didn’t ration the two bottles of cheap alcohol he’d brought on a whim. He’d still had what belongings he’d taken with him when he’d left with Grant, not that it was much – but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell the data reader that contained the only copy of Vila’s Federation file. He drank the alcohol in one night, just after taking off, staring sightlessly at the file on its small display.

It didn’t help, of course, and when he woke up after falling asleep uncomfortably across the consoles and found the reader’s screen blank, the sheer flare of terror at the thought that he might have erased the file in his drunkenness was enough to make him take an alcohol neutraliser from the medical kit – despite its side effects of crippling nausea – and decide that becoming an alcoholic wasn’t in anyone’s interest. Not that there was any alcohol left on the ship in which to indulge, but there were other drugs and Avon had experience in reprogramming drinks synthesisers far more complex than the one on this ship.

He didn’t touch the synthesisers or the drugs.

 

Hours blurred into days, days blurred into weeks. Boredom stretched the minutes excruciatingly, leaving Avon with altogether too much time to think, watching the injuries he’d sustained under torture fade and disappear, even as the pain in his heart didn’t.

The flight computer only had limited capacity for linking up with galactic databases, not that Avon was in the mood to do any research at all. He let the news wash over him via a continuously open subspace channel, though they only reported more of the same. The last news of the _Liberator_ had come from the edge of the galaxy, the outer planets, and that was where Avon had directed the ship.

He read Vila’s file until he could recite it word for word – until it stopped making him want to throw up – and tried very hard not to think of the fact that the things described within it had been done to a man he’d known – to a man he _loved_. It was only marginally easier than trying not to think of Anna, breathing her dying breath in his arms on the cold forest floor of the rebel camp – of _Anna_ , drawing her gun to shoot him, if he hadn’t acted first.

There was a small mirror in the sleeping cabin of the ship which Avon avoided or else lingered in front of for hours, trying to make sense of what he saw in the reflection. Sometimes, if he’d been dressing, he’d stand and let his fingers ghost over the scar tissue on his shoulder.

He was there when he found the _Liberator._

It wasn’t a message from Orac, as he had half-expected – it wasn’t a message at all, only suddenly the link-up to Zen that he had been trying diligently, more out of habit than any real hope, every day, connected and held. With shaking hands, Avon tried to establish communications contact, but didn’t get through. The _Liberator_ ought to have been in range, but perhaps his comm circuits were faulty. The ship had never been in the best state.

Instead, he slaved his flight computer to Zen, leaving it to the autopilot to keep track and bring them close. It was dangerous should he run into any pursuit ships – he’d have to break the link before he could take evasive manoeuvres, but Avon had no illusions of how an encounter with pursuit ships would end. If they decided to fire on him, he was dead, evasive manoeuvres or not. He had no hope of outrunning them and he certainly couldn’t outgun them. The ship’s weapons were practically defunct – he’d cannibalised the parts to fix the engine after that first disastrous take-off.

He hadn’t seen any alien ships – not really. He had come across some strange wreckage, however – evidence of battles that only increased as he got closer to the edge of the spiral rim. Avon was distinctly glad that he hadn’t had the misfortune to have to face down one of the aliens.

More immediately, he was suddenly aware of how _bad_ he looked. Haltingly, he made some effort to clean up as the distance to _Liberator_ shrank – she was heading towards him, limping really, or he would have had no hope of catching her. Most of all, Avon didn’t want to explain himself to Blake – didn’t want to give Blake any reason at all to demand an explanation. He hoped, in a vague way, that Blake had heard the rumours of his death and that finding them not entirely true would be enough to derail any further questions. _Where have you been? What happened?_

Avon didn’t know what he would tell him, if he _did_ ask. Unless Grant had told him, Blake didn’t even really know about Anna.

Avon waited at the controls, his hand on the communication links, half an eye on the navigation computer, when he came into close range of the _Liberator_. He was far closer than he should have got – his ship didn’t have any shielding to speak of, nothing at all to deflect the _Liberator_ ’s sensors. Zen should long have spotted him, should long have alerted the crew and engaged in some way. Of course, if the _Liberator_ fired, he was as good as dead, if it didn’t blow him sky-high on the first salvo. _Liberator_ didn’t look damaged – but it looked empty. Avon had never seen it from space before they’d been forced to board it, but it had had the same feeling about it, then – empty, alien, dangerous.

Avon mistrusted these kinds of feelings automatically and he fervently hoped he was wrong.

A piece of floating debris set off his proximity alert, and Avon swiftly killed the alarm. He had been navigating debris for over two days now – a battle field, residual momentum forever carrying what remained from the destroyed ships into all directions.

He’d been hesitant to hail the _Liberator_ openly – who knew who might be listening? – but the time for subtlety was over. Avon activated the comm link, pushing the buttons with unnecessary force. “ _Liberator_ , Zen, come in.” They couldn’t have been foolish enough to erase his voiceprint – could they? There was no response, the comm link remained as dead as it had been.

Suddenly, the _Liberator_ accelerated sharply, turning about and shooting rapidly out of Avon’s sensory range.

Avon punched the console, hurting no one but himself. “Damn!” He had been so close – could practically have laid in a docking manoeuvre – and now the _Liberator_ was gone.

“Damn!” Avon murmured again, with feeling, and bit his lip, trying to think.

His navigation was still linked to Zen – or it had been, up to the point where the _Liberator_ had accelerated away so rapidly that he’d lost her. The Wanderer was groaning, the engines screaming to execute the _Liberator_ ’s fast turn and slot in the vector she had taken. It was as good a place as any to start, so Avon left the course as it was – but he would have to diverge from it eventually, or starve abandoned and alone in deep space.

Why the _hell_ had the _Liberator_ not responded to his presence? Surely a ship moving under its own velocity couldn’t escape a battle computer as sophisticated as Zen, not even in a field of debris?

Avon’s thoughts stuttered to a halt at that and he stared at the sensor scope, disbelieving. He ran a systems’ check, but got an all clear on the sensors – impossible. Avon rose, peering out of the small porthole maintenance window. There was nothing out there. For days, he had been able to watch debris floating past, now, there was nothing but open space.

“Impossible.”

Avon checked the sensors again – but he hadn’t moved, the coordinate triangulation the same, save for the little progress he had made into the direction the _Liberator_ had vanished into.

 Feeling slightly giddy – had he finally gone mad? – Avon ran a full-range sensor sweep. Nothing. No debris, no gutted ship carcasses, no evidence of large scale space battles at all – not evidence of _any_ space battles at all. No sign of the familiar engine signatures of pursuit ships that had criss-crossed his sensor scope only hours earlier. At the furthest range, he could just about pick up an orderly range of engine signatures – a space lane, not unlike the ones the Federation had established in their core territory. But there shouldn’t be one out here – there _wasn’t_ , there _hadn’t been_ , not when Avon had come that way a few hours earlier.

Surely, if his mind was that far gone, he would have noticed by now?

Avon set the ship to full speed, tracing the _Liberator_ ’s flight vector. The further he got from the middle of nowhere he had found her in, the stranger the sensory data became. Space stations that shouldn’t have existed started appearing before him, relay stations, most of them, but some larger structures, inhabited. Avon gave them a wide berth, but opened his comm channels to all frequencies and listened with disbelief and fascination to the chatter. Civil chatter – freighters, passenger cruisers. No military movements, no coded transmissions, no news of war and invasion and death.

What the hell had happened?

Vaguely, Avon recalled a theoretical paper he had read – or rather, tried to comprehend to the best of his ability – years ago. Theoretical physics wasn’t exactly his field, but the thought had captivated him, and the fact that the Federation had banned the paper had only added to its mystique: the multiverse. Innumerable parallel universes sitting side by side – figuratively, of course – some entirely alien to their own, some so close as to be nearly indistinguishable. In theory, travel between universes was possible, more so if there were many similarities between them – but it had always been nothing but theory.

Surely, if the _Liberator_ could cause travel between multiverses, Avon of all people would have known? But it was the only explanation that made any kind of sense. He hadn’t moved, physically, but he had clearly _moved_ , and even a somewhat patched together Wanderer engine couldn’t have caused it. He had been very close to the _Liberator_ , close enough to be pulled along…

But that suggested that something or someone on the _Liberator_ had activated whatever had happened. Someone might still be alive on it, after all, and of all of them, Blake was the one most likely to be too stubborn to die – the one most likely to be lucky enough to find a function such as this by mere chance. And Blake, upon finding that he was no longer in the universe they knew, would sooner or later go to Earth, straight into the heart of the Federation.

Avon sighed, considering his food rations. It would be close, but if he was a little stricter, made more use of the protein, he might just about make it without stops and detours. It was a better chance than tracing the _Liberator_ ’s path, anyway – she might already have changed course again, and without her, Avon certainly had no hope of getting away from this universe, provided that he was right.

It was something to do, at any rate.

Avon calculated the vector and set a direct course back to Earth, trying not to think of what had happened there not all that long ago – only, of course, it hadn’t been _there_.

 

Over the next long, tedious weeks, Avon listened with growing fascination to the communication the Wanderer picked up. It became increasingly obvious that there was no Federation chatter. Avon didn’t dare speculate that there might not _be_ a Federation – he picked up the occasional coded message, especially as he returned to more inhabited parts of the galaxy, but for the most part it was private messages sent on open channels, communication between traders, a fair bit of scientific exchange.

Of course, the Wanderer put a rude end to Avon’s study of this new galaxy, so like his own and yet so very not, when it decided that the engine should not be taxed with continuous full speed for a greater length of time. Avon ended up working nearly around the clock to keep them functional, pausing only to eat, as far as the rations permitted, and sleep, for a few hours at a time. Avoiding sleep was almost easy – he hadn’t much liked the nightmares that had plagued him of late – but the lack of sleep also made him feel worse, made him make mistakes, which he then needed to fix, which cost him more sleep. At least, he was left with very little time to think.

Avon was fairly sure that he wouldn’t be able to avoid Blake’s questions now, if Blake was indeed on the _Liberator_ , but at least he had a good excuse for looking ragged and run-down and several kilos lighter than when Blake had last seen him.

The alert he had set up for when the _Liberator_ appeared on his sensors sounded when Avon was deep in a maintenance shaft, trying to find a wire that wasn’t essential to use it to fix another engine fault. He jumped, striking his head on the rough ceiling of the crawlspace, and nearly collapsed with relief when he realised what the alarm was. He had said a lot about the faults of _Liberator_ ’s self-repair system and its erratic priority listing back in the day, but in situations as these, he would have given a lot for a self-repairing ship.

Groggily, Avon extracted himself from the maintenance space and fell into the pilot’s seat. He was nearing Earth sector, and there she was, in orbit around Earth itself. There was no sign of the planetary defences that Avon and Grant had navigated with great difficulty, and the _Liberator_ certainly wasn’t being shot at. There were just the space lanes that Avon had almost become used to seeing, and no sign of any military vessels.

Avon disabled the autopilot, bringing his ship in on his own course as best as he could. He didn’t want to draw attention – if he had a teleport, he would have been close enough by now, but he would have to dock to board the _Liberator_. And this time, he wasn’t planning on hesitating or attempting to communicate – any communication would be picked up by the innumerable satellites dotting the system.

To his astonished and utterly exhausted relief, he brought the small ship into dock without issues, without being challenged or shot at. Avon didn’t have a weapon – not anymore – but he took a laser knife from the Wanderer’s toolkit and slowly, very carefully, boarded.

He had docked on the opposite site to where they had first come aboard the _Liberator_ , or the sense of déjà vu might have been rather too much for his tired mind. Still, the ship struck him as eerily quiet – not that it had ever been very full, with a crew of under 10, but somehow they had managed to fill up the space, make it feel like coming home. Now, Avon felt rather like a thief stealing into someone else’s house in the dead of night – and he really wasn’t pleased with the mental image, calling up memories of another thief, who most certainly would not be walking these hallways again.

Encountering no one and no active defence mechanisms, Avon made his way to the secondary computer control and very quietly addressed Zen. “Zen, it’s Avon,” he said, and immediately chided himself for a fool – if his voiceprint was in the system, Zen would know that. “Is there anyone else on board?”

“Negative,” came the immediate response.

Avon sighed. He wanted to let down his guard, knowing that no one would start shooting at him in the corridors, but an empty _Liberator_ was not a pleasant prospect. “Where is everyone?”

“Roj Blake is no longer aboard the _Liberator_ ,” came the predictable, but still somewhat informative response. So at least _Blake_ had been on the ship until recently.

Avon pocketed the knife and ran a hand through his hair, suddenly indescribably weary. He desperately needed sleep – how long had it been? Twenty-four hours? More? He couldn’t quite remember, but his hand, when he lowered it, was shaking badly.

“All right,” he said, half to himself and half to Zen. “Zen, lock anyone who isn’t part of the crew out of your systems and activate the intruder defence; I don’t want to be boarded.”

“Confirmed.”

“Thank you.” Avon pushed himself away from the console he’d been leaning on, and walked down the corridor, habitually taking the way back to his cabin of old – hoping that it hadn’t been disturbed. There were plenty of empty ones, if Blake had decided to recruit more crew after Avon had gone; his was nothing special.

And it was as Avon had left it. He stood in the open door for a moment, painfully aware that the man who had walked out of it not all that long ago was a far cry from who he was, now. The bed had never looked more inviting, however.

A grumbling stomach reminded Avon of another order of business and he turned on his heel, tiredly trudging down to the kitchen and picking up a large portion of noodles – something the synthesisers could just about handle and that would fill his stomach quickly enough. He walked over the teleport bay, where he collected a bracelet, to the flight deck, where he ran a systems’ check, finding everything normal, and took a gun, before he returned to his cabin, securely locking the door behind himself. Everything else could wait until he had rested.

Avon let a shower ease his tense muscles and went to lie down after managing only a few bites of food. He was asleep within seconds.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've reached BDaS's plot in the chronology, so you might find it easier to follow if you refresh your memory of BDaS, though I have tried to leave enough detail to at least make clear where we are, even where I haven't renarrated every scene.

He awoke, as always, when his exhaustion made way to light sleep and the nightmares, mercilessly merging his own experiences of torture with Vila’s file, tormenting him with memories of Anna, who had never really been who he’d thought she was, and Vila, with whom he had never had a chance to share experiences like these.

Gritting his teeth, Avon dressed – a soft black and green ensemble that didn’t emphasise quite how much thinner he had got since selecting it from the storage – and buckled the gun about his waist, clipping the bracelet around his arm. Zen would respond to him and an emergency teleport might come in handy, even if the Wanderer class ship was hardly in a state to run – and Avon was hardly keen on abandoning the _Liberator_ , if he had any choice.

He had barely stepped out of his cabin and locked the door when he heard steps echoing down the corridor. Cursing himself internally for not checking that he was still the only life sign on board, Avon flattened himself against the wall at an intersection. The moment the intruder came into view, Avon closed his hand around his arm, shoving him face first into the wall and hiking his wrist up his back. A man, about Avon’s size, thinning, greying hair, possibly brownish once. Avon pulled his gun, lifting it up to the man’s head. “Who the _hell_ are you?”

Abruptly, the man stopped his feeble struggles. For a breath, two, he said nothing, then: “Avon?!”

For the second time in so many weeks, Avon doubted his sanity. Abruptly, as though it had burned him, he released the man’s wrist, almost expecting him to vanish as soon as he broke contact. He didn’t. “ _Vila_?”

Vila turned in the space Avon had left him between the wall and his own body, which felt rooted to the spot. “Hello, Avon.”

Avon took an involuntary step back, his gun no longer pointing at anything in particular. It was undoubtedly Vila – but he looked much older, much more tired. His hair, never ample, had receded further, had greyed. There were lines on his face that were unfamiliar, though Avon noted, distantly, that they didn’t all seem to be from pain. Vila’s clothes were strange, as well, but Avon couldn’t quite get past the fact that, suddenly, Vila was _alive_ and _older than himself_. “What is going _on_?”

“Where did you come from?” Vila asked right back, his voice still the same cadence and tone, the same easily babbling lilt. “There was no one on board when we made contact with the _Liberator_ – except Blake, that is.”

So Zen’s words _hadn’t_ been a coincidence. “Ah, so Blake _is_ here,” Avon said, fighting to control his own voice. Somehow, Vila seemed far less surprised to see him. “I had wondered. There were no life signs when I came on board,” he continued, holstering the gun. Part of him clamoured that it might be a trap, a convoluted illusion, an induced hallucination even, preying on his overtired mind. But it was _Vila_ , and Avon couldn’t _bear_ pointing a gun at him.

“Well, you’re not supposed to be here,” Vila said cleverly.

Avon hadn’t expected _him_ , of all people, to bring up multiverse theory. “Yes, I discovered as much.” If little else. “ _You_ know about multiverse theory?”

“Only because _you_ can’t seem to stop going on about it,” Vila shot back, and for the first time, Avon considered – really considered what a multiverse meant. Not just the surroundings would be there, would be similar and yet different – the people would be, too. If Vila was here, then so, it appeared, was he. Then so, perhaps, were all of the others.

“Not what I was talking about, though,” Vila went on, ignoring Avon’s silence. “Blake said you were dead.”

He had heard the rumours then. If only Avon could have reassured him that they were entirely untrue. He turned away from Vila, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Yes, I was afraid of that. I wish he’d have waited a moment or two before pulling both of our ships into a different universe.” It felt odd, to talk to someone at such length. Even now, it must be more words than he had spoken in weeks – or had it been months? “The _Liberator_ isn’t an easy ship to follow if all you have is a small Wanderer class vessel. Blake, at least, is predictable.” Avon looked back at Vila and noted, finally, that he had his arms raised as if he were still standing at gunpoint. “You can lower your arms, Vila.” _Vila_. The name left a bittersweet taste on his tongue.

“Oh. Right.” Vila dropped his hands and edged away from the wall.

Avon nearly laughed, despite himself. “It’s good to see you, Vila,” he said, just to taste the name again, hoping that it might dissolve the heavy knot at the back of his throat.

“Yes, wish I could say the same,” Vila mumbled, “and I thought I was going to get some rest.”

He had been going to his own cabin, Avon realised suddenly – the one right next to his own, painfully empty since Vila had died – only here he was. It didn’t look like he had changed much. Avon stared at him, on the verge of saying something foolish, when Vila suddenly seemed to shake himself, standing up a little straighter.

“Look, we should let Blake know you’re here, or he’ll get a heart attack when he runs into you. He’s on the flight deck – I’ll go first, shall I? How did you get past the detector shield, anyway?”

Avon fell in step beside him, absently rubbing his hand. “There was no detector shield when I came on board.”

“Hang on, how long have you been here?”

“Perhaps a day, now. Zen said nobody else was on board.”

Vila gave him a strange glance. “You said.”

Had he? Yes, he probably had. Avon shrugged.

“There probably wasn’t, when you showed up,” Vila went hastily on, almost falling over his words. “Must have just missed…” He trailed off, lapsing into silence for the rest of the way to the flight deck.

Avon studied him from the side, wondering what had happened to him. Undoubtedly Vila had aged – he supposed it was possible that the universes were temporarily misaligned, but they also might not be. Avon had seen stranger things than premature aging, but he didn’t want to ask – didn’t want to find out just how much separated him from _this_ Vila.

Blake, at least, was the same. Surprisingly calm – even calmer than Avon was used to, in fact – but he was the Blake Avon remembered, the one that had remained on this _Liberator_ when Avon had left. He clasped Avon’s hand tightly, a real, fond smile lighting up his face. “Avon, it’s good to see you. We received word that you were dead.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything Federation propaganda tells you, Blake,” Avon said, withdrawing his hand. He was almost surprised how happy he was to see Blake. It felt like a lifetime ago that they had parted, and it hadn’t been on the best of terms. But with all that had happened – and with Vila-not-Vila hovering awkwardly in his back, Avon was only too ready to wipe the slate clean and start anew.

Still, there was only so much small talk he could endure, even seated comfortably on the _Liberator_ ’s sofa, before he had to address the proverbial beast in the room. “What happened to the others, Blake?”

Blake fell silent for a moment, looking at nothing in particular. His face grew sombre. “Cally left us not long after you did, to return to Auron. We had a complete communication breakdown during the war – I don’t know whether she’s still alive.”

Avon had thought that Cally, of all people, would stay with Blake to the end of his crusade. Apparently, he had been wrong.

“Jenna and Gan… There were only the three of us to run the ship, in that final battle, and after I got taken out… Jenna suggested a suicide run, but Gan volunteered to go in her stead. I tried to stop them, but we had no real choice. With Gan’s distraction, Jenna managed to pick them off – but she must have been hiding a wound. I found her in the corridor, after I’d managed to get myself out of the medical unit.” Blake fell silent, staring at the corridor leading away. “We’d picked up some rumour about the aliens dying, but I was alone and injured and ran.”

Avon thought about the debris field he’d been navigating and tried not to imagine that Gan had been amongst the bodies – that, had he caught up a little earlier, he might have been able to help – or have been blasted to fragments in the fracas. “I’m sorry, Blake.” What else was there to say?

Avon didn’t know what he had imagined to come back to upon returning to the _Liberator_ ; he supposed he had expected everything to be the same. Why should the things that had been shattering _his_ life affect anyone else? But this could very well be the end of Blake’s Cause. Chances were, there were only the two of them left – not that Blake had ever had many friends to begin with. The rebellion hadn’t fared well in the chaos of the war, during which the population welcomed the Federation’s military power as a lifesaver – at least as far as Avon had been able to tell. He supposed he’d wanted Blake to tell him what to do next – and hadn’t imagined that Blake might be at a loss himself. And yet, Blake had seemed… fine, cheerful, almost.

Avon glanced to Vila-not-Vila who was lounging at the central console as if no years separated him and their Vila and wondered.

“What of Grant?” Blake asked into the silence.

“He went his own way.”

“He’s still alive then? That’s good.”

“If he hasn’t managed to get himself killed since we parted.”

Blake’s expression suddenly brightened. “We did it, here. Well, not me – but the rebellion won, Avon! The universe is at peace, and the Federation is taking its first steps as a democracy. Vila here is its chancellor!”

For a moment, Avon was sure that Blake was joking – but Blake’s humour didn’t tend to stoop to such lows. Avon returned his gaze to Vila, who had his feet up on the console and was yawning, plainly not listening to their conversation. Despite himself, Avon laughed, hoping that the slight hysterical edge, tickling the back of his throat, wasn’t audible.

Blake proceeded to update him on what he had learned about this universe – it made sense, fitting in with what Avon had overheard in the comm channels, but that made it no less strange. It would take some time getting used to – not that Vila seemed intent on making a big deal of it.

Suddenly, Vila started, standing up straight. “Avon!”

“What is it?”

“Not you,” Vila said. “The _other_ you.”

Avon glanced towards Blake. “He’s on board?” He had recognised the detector shield, of course, and given that he hadn’t been there to install it… still, somehow even with Vila there, he hadn’t considered running into himself.

Blake just nodded.

“The sedative I gave him should be wearing off by now,” Vila went on, “I need to go check on him.”

That, surely, couldn’t be good. Uneasy curiosity brought Avon to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”

“Are you sure?” Blake asked, making it sound like it was the worst suggestion Avon had ever made. If only Blake had any idea.

“I’m sure.” Avon looked towards Vila. “Medical unit?”

“Yeah.”

 

Out in the corridor, there was no ignoring Vila’s nervousness. “It might be a bit of a shock,” Vila said.

Avon couldn’t help smiling. “For him or me?”

“Both, I think. I was talking about you.”

Avon wondered suddenly whether this Avon knew about Anna – whether this _Anna_ had been just as… well. He didn’t want to be the one to tell himself _that_. “Why do you say that?”

Vila fidgeted. “You could say the years haven’t been kind.”

Ah, so it _was_ a temporal misalignment. At least he no longer had to worry about what had happened to age Vila. “I didn’t imagine they were,” Avon said, struggling to remain serious. _Chancellor!_ “Considering that they ended with me back in the _Liberator_ ’s medical unit as soon as I had the chance.”

Vila froze abruptly and with uncharacteristic vehemence turned on Avon, pushing him into the wall by the shoulders. He used his full strength and size, for once, and Avon hissed as his fingers dug into his left shoulder – still tender, even after all this time. Vila’s grip eased a little, but he didn’t let him go. “You have _no idea_. Blake and you had a stroll of a life compared what happened to us. Don’t you _dare_ think you had it worse than him. Don’t you _dare_ make fun of him, for not living up to your expectations of being able to brush things off.”

Avon might have laughed, once he got over his surprise, if he hadn’t known that Vila could but take it the wrong way. His expectations had never been so low, and he had never been less capable of brushing things off. “I won’t,” he said, reaching up to tap his fingers against Vila’s wrist. “Vila, let go. I promise I won’t.”

“All right.” The fierceness receded from Vila’s eyes and he stepped back, looking apologetic when he caught Avon rubbing his shoulder. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

“It’s fine.” Avon dropped his hand back to his side. “You made your point.”

There was nothing else to say and they made their way to the medical unit in silence. When the entrance was in sight, Vila slowed, and Avon followed short, stopping where he stood.

“Should I tell you–” Vila began, sounding almost like he was talking to himself.

“No. Not if he won’t,” Avon said and forced his curiosity down. If he didn’t want to tell Blake what had happened, who was he to demand to know what had happened to the other Avon?

Vila seemed almost relieved. “All right.”

 

The other Avon was still asleep. Avon wasn’t happy that he had been sedated, but at the same time he was glad that he had a moment to get acquainted with the thought of meeting himself. It was less jarring than it should have been. Yes, this Avon was older – older than this Vila, but then he had always been. It was only natural that, with additional years, it should start to show. Vila moved around him with obvious familiarity and Avon wondered whether they had always been together, all the years that were engraved in both their faces. It was strange, seeing how he would look, however many years down the line – but then, he had felt old himself, staring into that mirror on the Wanderer. He couldn’t really claim to be surprised.

“How much longer?” he asked Vila, who was studying the medical computer readout.

Vila glanced up briefly, then back down at his Avon. “An hour.”

“I want to talk to him when he wakes up. Alone.” He needed to know – perhaps to punish himself, if she hadn’t – perhaps to find some consolation that even with Vila there, not all things had been for the better in this universe. And perhaps for the wild hope to find that they had.

Vila didn’t like the idea. “And scare him to death?”

Avon doubted that. “Hardly. Do you imagine you’d explain better than I could?” So easy to talk to Vila as if he were _Vila_.

Vila made a face. “Probably not.”

So easy to talk to Vila – except about the things that had mattered, and then it was too late. “There are a few things we need to talk about, Vila. In private.”

Vila scanned his face, then nodded reluctantly. “All right. But I’ll be right outside. And only if those things don’t involve killing him to take his place.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to him – he had enough of killing, certainly, and yet… “No. I’m… not the suicidal type,” Avon said, not quite sharing the private joke.

 Then again, perhaps Vila understood. “Yes,” he said, looking down at the other one. “I know.”

 

Vila gave him a rundown of this Avon’s condition in the time they waited – just the medical facts, nothing else. Avon didn’t let himself wonder how his counterpart had injured his knee this badly – disablingly badly – but he didn’t think he needed to look far. After all, the state of his own shoulder was proof enough of that. When other-Avon began stirring, Vila set aside the cooling gel he’d been applying to his knee and with a last, meaningful look at Avon left the medical unit – not that Avon thought he’d go far.

The ease with which he could read his counterparts features, even while he was half-unconscious, was almost startling, but then Avon had spent a long time making sure his face showed only what he wanted it to show. “It’s just a cooling gel,” he answered the unspoken question, stepping up to the bed to pick up the glass of water Vila had left.

The other Avon started, his eyes snapping open, and once, Avon was sure, he would have half-risen to his elbows.

“Apologies,” Avon said, containing a slightly hysterical laughter in a small smirk. “I’m afraid I’m not up to date with the protocols of introducing oneself to… oneself.” He held the glass out to the other, who accepted it wordlessly and drank.

“Thanks,” the other said finally, sounding a little rougher than Avon thought his own voice was – but then, hearing one’s own voice from the outside was always a very strange experience. “What happened to Vila?”

Well. At any rate they hadn’t just reunited recently. “Nothing. He’s outside, pacing in the corridor, no doubt, making sure I don’t do anything but talk. You must have expected this, of course,” Avon said, vaguely indicating himself. They were the intruders, after all, he and Blake and their ships.

The other scanned his face for a moment then inclined his head. “I’d considered the possibilities. Only Blake said–”

“Blake thought I was dead, I know. I would have been around sooner, only the _Liberator_ is a very fast ship. If I hadn’t lost it immediately after being pulled along in the shockwave, I would still be trying to trace Blake’s path around the Outer Planets now. The Wanderer class isn’t very fast, not even the… remake.” It was probably a miracle he had made it at all. Perhaps now that he was docked to the _Liberator_ , he could finally think about properly fixing that damned engine.

“But Blake would go to Earth eventually and so you set a direct course,” other-Avon said in the tone of someone who would have done the same thing.

“Yes.” Avon pulled up a chair, not feeling up to standing for this conversation. “There are a few things we probably should discuss.”

 

He tried not to, but Avon looked at Vila differently when he came back into the room. Who was he – who were they that they had managed to stick together through all that? Avon didn’t doubt that he could be driven to killing Vila to save his own life – once, at any rate. Now that he had experienced what it was like to live with Vila’s death, he didn’t think he could have lifted a hand against him, even if he’d been pointing a weapon at Avon’s head. And yet, he’d have thought that an incident like that would have driven Vila away. _His_ Vila had never been reticent to voice it when Avon got on his nerves – surely he hadn’t been cowed into staying? But no, for all that had apparently happened, Vila seemed next to unchanged.

“No. Just know how to read my Avons,” Vila was saying, grinning that familiar grin. Avon tried not to stare. “We need to find a way to tell you two apart, though,” Vila went on, glancing over to Avon, “Avon and Avon is going to get confusing quickly. We could call one of you Kerr.”

_Heroic gestures, Kerr?_ “Don’t,” Avon said, and found himself disconcertingly echoed by his counterpart.

Vila didn’t seem surprised. “Any suggestions, then?”

Avon caught the other’s gaze and shrugged. There was no point in arguing who should receive the alias. “I’ve used Chevron as an alias before,” though he had tried to avoid it lately, “but I was thinking…”

“River,” his counterpart interrupted with unfailing accuracy.

Avon nodded. _You could not step twice into the same river_ , he thought, wondering whether he had misremembered the quote, whether Vila, who still didn’t look surprised, knew of Heraclitus.

 

Avon watched the two of them discussing medical matters with growing, selfish regret. He’d thought he’d allowed himself to grieve over Vila – but apparently he couldn’t help the bitter taste of missed chances – perhaps this was what Vila had meant when he’d half-joked that Avon might want to take _his_ Avon’s place.

That Avon’s condition was evidently an old topic between them, and Avon found himself suddenly wondering whether _Vila_ , of all people, was that Avon’s primary carer and confidant. He shouldn’t have been so surprised at the thought – hadn’t he just wished he could have grown old with Vila himself? And yet… He wondered whether _this_ Vila had been there after _that_ Avon shot Anna Grant.

Vila was running another scan on the computers, and when the results came in, Avon watched his face fall in sadness. It was almost impossible to bear.

“Vila…” Avon said, before he could check himself.

Vila ignored him, staring down at the console, the bitterness in his voice tasting like ash in Avon’s mouth, even though it wasn’t directed at him. “s all right, I don’t need an ‘I told you so’. _I’m_ just a hopeless fool who thought that if something could be done, you might not want to leave. I’ll be on the flight deck,” Vila finally announced and walked out, looking small and lost.

Avon stood rooted to the spot, letting go of all thoughts that _Vila_ hadn’t changed, not even getting as far as to wonder why _that_ Avon would want to leave. “When did Vila become cruel?” he asked finally, voicing the thought chasing about his head to what might as well have been an empty room.

“Do you expect me to answer that?” his counterpart asked, voice no less bitter than Vila’s, barely concealing the hurt.

Avon shook his head. “No.”

“Was there anything else?”

“No.” Avon finally shook himself out of his frozen posture, throwing a quick glance at the other. “I suppose ‘try to sleep’ is a futile suggestion.”

He received an icy glare in response. “Just get out.”

 

He acted on impulse, moving before he could think twice and regret the decision. It hadn’t served him well, lately, but this was _Vila_ , and there had been too many missed chances already. Still, he found himself dawdling, trying to drag out the way to Vila’s cabin – and still hoping that Vila had run there, which he might not have. After all, he wasn’t _Vila_.

However, when he knocked on the door, a snappish, “Go away!” answered him.

Avon leant on the doorframe, not quite trusting his legs. “Vila,” he said, savouring the name again.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” came Vila’s response.

“Vila, I’m not… him,” Avon said, wondering whether it would make a difference. This wasn’t _Vila_ either. Did it make a difference? It had to – of course it did.

“Yes, you are,” Vila answered, “you shot Anna, didn’t you? It was all downhill from there.”

Avon choked on a breath. He had no idea how Vila had figured it out – perhaps he had been listening at the door, but he had promised to give them privacy. Then again, Vila had always been surprisingly astute at reading him. With so many new years and years of practice on Vila’s end, perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. “Let me in. We should talk.”

He had just enough time to kindle a flicker of regret at the insistence when the door opened, revealing an unhappy Vila. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Not to him, maybe. But perhaps you will talk to me. Please, Vila.” Avon didn’t know what else to say.

Vila moved to the side to let him in, but kept holding himself stiffly, as if on the verge of bolting. Avon stepped further into the room, and was suddenly struck by the fact that he wasn’t standing in that Vila’s space – but in _his_ Vila’s, where he hadn’t really dared be since his death.

“What do you want?” Vila asked wearily.

Avon tore his hand back from the desk surface, trying to make it seem as though he hadn’t. He had probably failed – this was a Vila who knew him very well, after all. Well, not _him_ – but so far, Avon hadn’t been able to spot many differences. “Forgive me. I haven’t been in this room since Vila…” His throat closed abruptly, forcing him to swallow.

Vila finally closed the door. “Must have been a relief, to be finally rid of me. You can’t seem to stop trying.”

“I never wanted to be rid of you!” The sudden anger came as a surprise, so much more immediate than almost anything Avon had felt in the last weeks.

Vila shrugged, refusing to meet his gaze. “Well, perhaps not yet. Didn’t he tell you? He tried to kill me once. Has been pushing me away ever since.”

Avon didn’t know what to do with this irascible, bitter, _cruel_ Vila that reminded him less of Vila and more of… well, himself. But he had seen other things in the other Avon’s behaviour and he thought that Vila had seen them, too – but was choosing to ignore them. “Vila…”

Vila shook his head. “No, I’m just taking it out on you. Not like you aren’t too easy to tell apart.” Vila walked over to the cupboard where the other Vila had hidden his soma. “Drink? It might be a bit stale.”

By all rights, it shouldn’t have still been there – but none of them had dared touch the room. Avon accepted the glass in silence, settling down on an empty chair and trying to keep the two Vilas separate in his head even as Vila sprawled on the bed as if it were his.

“I don’t understand,” Avon said finally, focussing on the drink instead of on the ghosts.

“What?”

“You don’t want him to leave. He doesn’t want to leave you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Avon affirmed. He might not be able to read the other Avon perfectly all the time – but he hadn’t imagined things. Besides, if all else failed, _he_ wouldn’t have wanted to leave Vila, not after a lifetime, not after being forgiven _that_.

“Well,” Vila said acidly, “he’s giving a good impression, then. Perhaps you aren’t him, after all. Some things must be different, right?”

They _had_ to be, or Avon wouldn’t know how to cope with this Vila’s presence. Meeting himself was almost nothing by comparison to meeting a ghost. But Avon was still sure of one thing: “Vila, whatever he’s running away from, it isn’t _you_.”

Vila made a sound that might have been a scoff. “Did he send you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Well, then this is pointless, isn’t it? You might be able to make educated guesses, but you have no idea what’s on _his_ mind.”

“Educated guesses!” Well, if Avon couldn’t claim to know himself – but then, he probably couldn’t. He’d never thought himself a fool, but apparently Fate thought him her plaything in matters of love.

“Just let it go, Avon, eh?” Vila said, and Avon forced himself not to close his eyes, not to imagine that it was _his_ Vila. How could Vila’s voice have remained so unchanged? “You have enough messes of your own to fix without taking on his,” Vila went on.

_Messes!_ If only it were something that could simply be cleaned up by a few hours of dedicated effort.

“Go talk to Blake,” Vila said, “I know you want to. Go figure out what you want to do next, and leave me alone for a bit.”

Avon set the glass, still full, down on the table, torn between the impulse to do just as Vila had said and run and… well. He’d missed his chance with Vila, but at least he owed him the truth. “I… missed you, Vila.” He kept his eyes on the glass. “You wouldn’t understand how much.”

Vila made a harsh, abrupt sound. “Of course I wouldn’t. Just a Delta fool, me, eh?”

“I could have used you on Fosforon,” Avon forged on, skirting around the truth. “I nearly died in that hellhole of a base.” At least he would have died only knowing that _one_ of his old friends had betrayed him.

“Tynus!” Vila exclaimed after a moment.

Avon kept his gaze fixed on his hand, resting loosely around the glass. His throat felt dry, but he wasn’t sure that if he started drinking now, he wouldn’t join Vila in his intended binge. And he didn’t want to know what he might do, if he let his control slip but a second. “Ah, so you met him.”

“Yes, Avon took me down…” Vila sounded almost normal now, almost back to what Avon remembered. “Hang on, _I_ found that message to Federation HQ. How _did_ you get out?”

“It’s a long story.” It wasn’t, really.

“I like stories.”

Avon smiled, despite himself. Looking at the table, he could almost pretend… “Yes, I remember. In short, sheer luck, I suppose. Tynus was always a bad shot. Cally pulled me out before he could try again. The plague will have killed him, in the end.” Avon picked up the glass and drank down a swallow, after all. There had been something horrid about Tynus’s death, despite the facts – not that Avon had witnessed it. But Fosforon had become a dead world by the time he’d woken from sedation.

“How long did you stay with Blake, after?” Vila asked, sounding suddenly so… Vila. Curious, animated, friendly, harmless, kind. All right, perhaps Avon’s memory was glossing over the moments in which he had found Vila irritating – but still, he couldn’t not humour him, so he told him – about Exbar, about Albian – _of course_ they had done it in this universe – and then, Anna.

“Why’d you go back to Blake, then?”

Why indeed. “The galaxy was in chaos. The Federation cracked down on anything suspicious, blaming the tighter security, the harsher punishments on the threat of the aliens. At least half of it was probably propaganda. I was alone, and the _Liberator_ was the safest place in the galaxy. There was nowhere else to go. I learned that Blake thought I was dead and wanted to prove him wrong. I needed the ship. I missed him. Take your pick.” The truth was probably in there somewhere. Avon idly ran his finger over the edge of the glass, looking down at the floor and wishing that Vila wouldn’t let the silence last.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, the glass drained and nothing left to occupy him. “Vila?” Avon looked up finally, facing him – easier knowing that this wasn’t _Vila_ , as much as he wished it was.

“Hm?” Vila met his gaze blearily. “Oh. You’re still here.”

Which was more than could be said of _Vila_. “Yes. Vila, I’ve had a long time to think about the things I should have said to you when I had the chance.”

Vila sat up, making a face. “You’ve had too much to drink. You always were a lightweight.”

Avon thought of lost weeks and the numbing taste on his tongue and the things he hadn’t told Vila. “Perhaps,” he said, “nonetheless.”

“Avon…”

Oh, how nice to hear his name, directed at _him_. Avon didn’t mind the alias, could see its usefulness in this situation – but for a chance to have this conversation with _his_ Vila. “No, let me say this. Please.”

“All right,” Vila said, very softly. He’d lost some of his boisterousness, to be sure. Or perhaps Vila had always been capable of having serious discussions, and Avon had just never… “I know you’re not… him. Perhaps this is just so I can ease my own conscience. If so, I’m sorry. But perhaps you need to hear it, because _he_ isn’t going to mention it, not now.” He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts, even now not daring to voice what sat on the tip of his tongue. He oughtn’t – this wasn’t Vila, and he’d missed his chance. “Of all the people on the _Liberator_ , you were the only one I would have liked to think of as a friend.”

“Is that it?” Vila whispered.

“Yes. I don’t know why I… trusted you so quickly, but I did. I suppose I still do.” Avon shrugged. Did it matter, which Vila it was? Did it matter whether he spoke to the figments of his imagination, to his memories, the words never leaving his head – or said them to _this_ Vila, who was real enough, and yet… “I wasn’t sure whether you knew when you died.”

Vila didn’t respond, and Avon rose to his feet. “I should go.”

It was Vila’s turn to avoid his gaze. “It’s all right, you know,” he said.

“What is?”

“I think there are worse ways to go. Saved everyone else’s life, didn’t I?”

Avon still had nightmares about that dusty corridor and the stench and Blake’s grip on his arm. He thought of Vila’s file – and it did put things into perspective. “Yes.”

Vila nodded, glancing at him quickly. “I’ll see you later, then.”

Avon walked to the door, hoping that the other Avon had never had occasion to look at Vila’s Federation file and conclude that there were circumstances in which a death was kind. “Get some rest, Vila,” he said and forced himself to leave.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some "jump cuts" in the following, so you get two short chapters today!

Avon had not imagined that his first shift back on the _Liberator_ would end in a mad dash away from Earth’s defence grid. He hadn’t expected any excitement at all – had only taken the watch to have some time to study what information he could find on this universe and its organisation. Blake hadn’t explicitly mentioned staying, but Avon knew him well enough to be sure that he had been thinking it – apparently, the lack of direction couldn’t overcome the joy at the defeat of the Federation. Avon didn’t care to examine what he wanted too closely – but if this universe was as peaceful as it seemed, perhaps he could travel, or take his time to really learn to understand the _Liberator_ , or pick up one or two research projects he had never been able to pursue. In short, he’d allowed himself to entertain the thought that he had _options_. Of course it couldn’t go that smoothly, and if being shot at wasn’t indication enough that they were back where they had come from, the chatter that Zen picked up on the comm channels was certainly proof enough – not to mention Blake’s temper.

Avon ran a complete system’s check after everything had calmed down enough, trying to ignore his counterpart’s glances. He hadn’t expected their dual presence to be an issue – well, Avon hadn’t planned to stick around him for very long, mostly because sticking around Vila wasn’t doing him any good and Avon doubted that the two of them would ever part ways. Now, there was no leaving – they couldn’t just drop Avon and Vila off somewhere, either, no more than he or Blake could just leave. Aging aside – reports of _death_ aside – they would be recognised and imprisoned by the Federation before long.

Still, Avon hadn’t expected the vague feeling of inadequacy.

He’d thought, distantly, when he was still working under the Federation, that perhaps things might be more bearable if his superiors were his intellectual equals – but he hadn’t meant it quite so literally. It reminded him of having a brother, and he didn’t care for the reminder. After all, this was _his_ ship, and the fact that the other Avon evidently knew more about it than he did irked him, even if he wasn’t surprised. He’d thought that, maybe, being back in his own universe would balance the odds out a little – but of course the other Avon had been through the entire damned Cause already.

“You know,” Avon said, feeling rather like he was talking to himself, “I didn’t think Blake could win.”

“He didn’t,” his counterpart answered, not even looking up from the readout he was studying. Avon tried to ignore the feeling that his work was being double-checked.

“But his Cause survived, despite the odds.”

“Don’t you think we should focus on surviving the universe we’re in, rather than muse about mine?”

“I would have requested the odds of us doing it again from Orac, if Blake hadn’t managed to lose it.”

The other Avon sighed, finally meeting his gaze. He looked slightly less ill on his feet, but there was weariness in his expression that didn’t seem to fade. “Whatever you do, I recommend you take a different route than we did.”

As if on cue, Blake’s agitated voice came through the comm unit. “Avon, Vila needs help!”

The look of naked alarm on his counterpart’s face froze Avon into stillness, but the other didn’t seem similarly affected. He was already sliding out from behind the console, surprising Avon yet again with the speed. “What is it, Blake?”

“A panic attack, I think – Breathe, Vila!”

The other Avon – Vila’s Avon – immediately took over the mantra and hurried out – leaving Avon behind to wonder who he was trying to fool.


	8. Chapter 8

It was Cally!

Even though it had been painful, Avon had been glad to hear her voice. Not for the first time he wished that telepathy went both ways – not because he enjoyed it, far from it. He found it intrusive, often to the point of profound unease, but he couldn’t deny its practicality. At least they could have told Cally that they were on their way.

It would be good to see her again – Avon didn’t dare even think that they might be too late. Cally, of all of them, knew how to take care of herself, after all. He wondered what had happened to her, in that other universe. She must have died a long time ago, if Vila’s and the other Avon’s reaction was anything to go by – Avon just hoped her death hadn’t been as senseless as Vila’s. It certainly hadn’t happened in the same situation as they were facing now, which at least gave Avon a reason to remain calm. The differences between their universes were enough to convince him that even if the situation _were_ the same, the outcome might not be, but it still made a difference, not having to go into the flight to Auron thinking that, in the other universe, that had been it for Cally. Still, the terrible headache more than made up for the lack of additional anxiety.

 

“Hello, Avon,” Cally said to the _other_ Avon, deftly sidestepping Vila and appearing not at all thrown by his presence. But a moment later, her eyes narrowed. “But you’re not…”

Avon dropped his hands down to his sides, leaning against the doorway. “No, he isn’t.”

Cally turned towards him, her eyes lighting up with real joy. Avon found himself smiling. It _was_ good to see her, not only because she had to be one of the few people alive who were still happy to see _him_. He hadn’t told her of his plans before leaving with Grant – he hadn’t thought she’d approve – but he was very tempted to tell her everything now. It wasn’t as though he had ever been very good at keeping emotional matters hidden from her.

Cally clasped his arms, squeezing softly. “Avon.” She smiled, then turned back to the others. “And Vila, and… Avon?”

The other Avon looked at her, his eyes flickering briefly to Avon’s own. “Do you want the long version or the short?”

“Right now, I would like to get cleaned up. I’ll meet you on the flight deck in an hour?”

“Take your time, Cally!” Vila chimed immediately, and Avon caught his counterpart glancing towards him with a sour expression. It was really none of his business.

Cally brushed his arm again. “Walk with me, Avon?”

Avon pushed himself away from the wall. “Yes, of course. I assume your cabin is still as it was.”

Cally easily fell into step with him. “I had always planned to return, eventually. I merely thought that my time was better spent on Auron for a while.” She sighed. “So much death, Avon.”

He could relate. “Yes,” he said simply, biting his tongue before he could say more. Cally had just lost her planet.

“When did you come back?”

“Not very long ago. You’ll hear the whole story on the flight deck, no doubt – aren’t you curious how we picked _them_ up?”

Cally inclined her head. “Of course. I was very surprised to see Vila.”

“More surprised than to see two of me?”

They stopped in front of Cally’s old cabin, and she looked him up and down. “Perhaps.”

“It’s _his_ Vila, Cally. Make no mistake.”

Cally nodded, brushing her hand against his elbow again. “Thank you, Avon. I won’t be long.”

Avon resisted asking what she was thanking him for and returned her nod before walking on, taking the dismissal for what it was.

 

Hours later, he found himself walking with Cally to her cabin again, just to push the thought of the other Avon and his behaviour – and the fact that Vila had plainly gone to find him – out of his mind. He wondered whether his own cabin was now occupied.

“It _is_ good to be back,” Cally said, “despite the circumstances.”

“For lack of better alternatives, perhaps,” Avon said, mostly just to make her smile. It _was_ good to be back.

Cally’s lips quirked. She unlocked her room and waved him inside. “Join me for a drink, Avon?”

Avon stepped gingerly into the spartan cabin, wondering for the millionth time why Cally didn’t seem inclined to fill her rooms with decoration or personal affects, the moondisk she had kept for a while notwithstanding. Jenna’s cabin, the one glimpse Avon had got of it, was full of such things, as were his and Vila’s, in their own way. The only other room he knew to be as empty was Blake’s – perhaps there was some connection between a revolutionary mindset and decoration preferences. “I didn’t know you had any.”

“No adrenalin and soma, or anything alcoholic. I brought a juice with me from the kitchen earlier.” Cally filled him a glass, passing it over as she settled down on the edge of a chair. Perhaps this was her Auronar idea of comfort.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Avon asked, not knowing what else to say.

“No.” She drank a sip from her own glass. “Do you?”

Did he? “No.”

“It’s not easy, seeing Vila,” Cally said, though Avon knew very well that she meant _It can’t be easy for you_.

“Regret is part of being alive, Cally. Keep it a small part.”

Her lips quirked. “As you do?”

Despite himself, Avon found himself grinning back. “Demonstrably.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get the impression most people are still catching up, so I'm not even going to apologise that this is slightly late! But, even though these are slightly more substantial than the last two, I'll give you two chapters at once again.

 He didn’t find the other Avon in his cabin when he returned from Cally’s. For a moment, he stood in the doorway, studying Vila’s closed door and wondered if that was where they had both got to. He wasn’t sure if he cared to find out, one way or another, and instead returned to the circuit boards he’d been analysing at his desk. He told himself that he _wasn’t_ trying to catch up on however many years of knowledge the other Avon was ahead of him, that it was simply a distraction from other things. Somehow, it was easier to admit that he was still working through grief and, yes, regret, than it was to acknowledge that he might be jealous of the other Avon, who still had his Vila despite everything, despite how appallingly he behaved, at times. Not that Avon couldn’t understand it. There probably weren’t two people who had more in common; the fact that they were reacting differently to some things made him reconsider just how much a person was shaped by their circumstances, their past.

By the time the morning rolled around, Avon had finally settled into the tediousness of space travel enough to feel as safe as he ever had on the _Liberator_. The nightmares had let off a little, perhaps only because he finally had the freedom for a more regular sleep schedule. He showered and returned to the circuits, wondering whether he should see if Blake was up and could offer some thoughts on how they had travelled across dimensions. He told himself that it wasn’t because he wanted to be rid of his alter ego and his Vila as soon as possible.

He heard them in the corridor before the knock came, so he wasn’t surprised and managed to swallow down the comment about the other Avon wearing _his_ Vila’s clothes. The other Vila, he supposed, saw them as his own. “Ah, I did wonder whether you found somewhere else to sleep.”

The other Avon shot him a vague glare, his knuckles tightening briefly on the cane he carried, and waved his free hand at the open door. “Do you mind?”

Avon let him in, closing the door behind them. “You look better today,” he said, not daring to think the impression through to its conclusion.

“A bit of sleep will do that,” his counterpart said distractedly. He was staring at the chess set – Vila’s chess set, sitting on Vila’s tool box.

In a moment of weakness, of sentimentality, when Avon had picked the extra lock to Vila’s cabin shortly after his death with shaking hands, he’d taken the items with him – justifying himself with the thought that Vila’s high precision tools shouldn’t go unused, not that the same thing could be said of the chess set.

Avon forced himself to sit back down. “I didn’t take much with me when I left. Del and I were going after Anna’s killer – most things would have been unnecessary baggage.” The rest, he had lost or sold, with the exception of the data reader hidden behind a panel under the bed. “There are still plenty of things in the wardrobe.”

But the other Avon reached out to open the chess set. If he hadn’t looked so pensive, Avon might have snapped at him to keep his hands off it. A knot in his throat, he steeled himself to speak, “It belonged to–”

“Vila.” He glanced up for a second, meeting Avon’s gaze. “Yes. I know.”

“Perhaps I should give it back.”

His counterpart pulled his hand back, straightening. “Don’t bother. Vila doesn’t need it – nor the tools.”

_Nor me_ , Avon thought and squashed the thought down fiercely the instant he became conscious of it. “He might if we cannot get you back home.”

The other Avon didn’t seem particularly concerned. “There are enough chess sets on the _Liberator_ , and Vila has his own set of tools. More advanced ones, too.”

Of course they would be. Avon would have liked to look at them, but he had begun to wonder whether too much foreknowledge wasn’t more of a curse. “You slept in his cabin.” _With him_?

His counterpart moved to the wardrobe, and Avon wondered whether it was always so obvious when he was avoiding a topic of conversation. “Yes.”

“I take it he was there too.”

“Yes. We… have got used to the lack of personal space.”

Avon wanted to scoff. He couldn’t believe that that was all there was to it, not after he had seen the way this Avon had rushed to Vila’s side – not after _he_ had been cruelly confronted with his own feelings. “Avon,” he said, not quite sure how to put it.

“What?”

“I was just wondering whether you had stopped lying to yourself about him yet.” Avon hoped he had – because then there would at least have been a chance for him, then he had at least been right to grieve for lost chances. If even this Avon had never realised, much less followed through… well, there really was no point. Perhaps he would never have told Vila, if he hadn’t died.

But the other Avon tilted his head. “Oh yes. A long time ago.”

“Really?”

The other Avon slipped into a black sweater and silver jacket combination, covering up the small, barely noticeable scar on his shoulder, so unlike Avon’s own – not that that was the only scar on the other Avon’s body. “Clearly _you_ have, so you oughtn’t be surprised.”

“Yes. But he had died.”

His counterpart surprised him with a sudden burst of anger, an open palm slammed against the wall. “And I tried to kill him! Does that answer your question?!”

Avon stared him down. He had learned some things from Blake, after all. “Well?”

“What difference does it make?”

“A lot, when you can still do something about it!” Avon came to his feet, now angry himself. He’d felt inferior to this Avon’s age and knowledge, but perhaps there was a thing or two he had ahead of him, after all. He thought back to the bitterness on that Vila’s face, when he’d come to talk to him so early on – he owed it to Vila, at least, to say something. “Do you think he knows?!”

The other Avon gathered up Vila’s robe that had pooled at his feet. “Possibly.”

Avon wished he couldn’t recognise that tone. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

“Vila already has too many reasons to feel sorry for me without adding another one.”

As if this were about Vila. “I _know you_ , Avon!” Avon exclaimed, resisting the urge to get into the other’s space. “Are you punishing yourself or hurting him?”

The other’s eyes flared with anger. “Drop it.”

“Yes, because that has worked out so well for either of us.”

His expression fell, and Avon saw his larynx move. “Anna…”

“No,” he cut across him, before he could even think about it. He didn’t think he could ever step into a forest again, if the mere thought brought up the heavy smell of moist dirt from where she had fallen–

Carefully placing the probe he’d been toying with down on the table, he took a step towards the other one. Perhaps if it had been his Vila, he would have had the same doubts, but not after he had observed them from the outside. Vila was different – he had to be different, if he had managed to forgive not just who Avon was, but what he had done. “You cannot seriously believe he would betray you, after all those years!”

Suddenly, there was a sharp knock on the door – speak of the devil. “Avon? Should I go ahead and make tea or will it be cold by the time the two of you are done?”

Avon dragged in a sharp breath.

His counterpart was avoiding looking at him. “Just a moment, Vila!” he called out, and a moment later he was gone, the door closing behind him.

Avon only dared to turn around after he was sure they had both gone, not sure whether he could bear to see them together and know that his counterpart was well on the way of making the same mistake he had made. How many times, in the last years – decades! – could Vila have died?


	10. Chapter 10

“Ah, this is where you vanished to.”

Avon glanced up from the wiring he’d been examining. Some sections of the _Liberator_ were truly alien, and he couldn’t be quite sure if what he was looking at was essential data transfer nodules or the fuse for the lights in corridor Gamma. He would find out before long. “What do you want, Blake?” They were in flight with a purpose again, now that Cally had found that Avon’s counterpart had a formula for a Pylene 50 antidote, but pharmaceutical medicine was about as far from his field as it was possible to get within the sciences. Avon didn’t think he would be of much use, brooding over the formula on the flight deck.

Blake just stood in the doorway, watching. “Nothing in particular. Cally was looking for you earlier.”

Avon tapped his tool against his palm. “Well, she’ll find me eventually. We can’t all sit around and do nothing.”

“You understand, though, don’t you – why we’re pursuing the antidote?”

Avon studied him for a moment, wondering whether he was really reading insecurity in Blake’s manner. “Yes, I understand. Why do you ask?”

“Perhaps I’m just not used to not having to argue with you.”

Avon smirked and picked himself up off the floor. “Perhaps I’ll argue about your methods later. For now, it is the right thing.”

“You’re not just saying that because it is what Cally wants, are you?”

“I _am_ capable of having my own opinions, Blake.”

“Good.” Blake was silent for a moment. “I’m not always sure I am, these days.”

Avon sighed and went to close up the circuit. He plainly wasn’t going to get anywhere. “Something my counterpart said?”

Blake stopped nibbling at his fingers and made a vague gesture. “Where did we go so wrong that you ended up shooting me, Avon?”

“ _I_ didn’t,” Avon said, just to be contrary.

“You know what I mean.”

“Why don’t you ask _him_ , Blake?” He leant back against the computer banks. “I feel no particular urge to shoot you, for a change.”

“How could I?”

Avon sighed. “Is this going to be a long conversation, Blake? If it is, I would rather have it somewhere more comfortable than the auxiliary computer control.”

Blake smiled. “Is the rec room sufficient, or do you prefer your cabin?”

“No, thank you – the rec room will do.” Avon gathered up his tools. “Let’s go. Though I’m warning you, I’m not here for you to rehearse a conversation you should be having with other me.”

Once at the rec room, Blake made them coffee – not that Avon particularly liked the way Blake made coffee. He didn’t feel like protesting – after the last month or so of crushing solitude the back and forth amongst their much diminished crew was almost soothing.

“I guess I was expecting you to be different,” Blake was saying.

Avon leant back in his chair and grinned. “What, in old age?”

“Not quite that old yet, Avon.”

“I don’t think I expected to get that old – or perhaps I don’t _expect_ to get that old. Time has lost a bit of its meaning, hasn’t it?”

Blake laughed. “You could say that.” He cradled his cup between his hands. “I feel like I have to do it all over again, even though I haven’t. Isn’t that strange?”

“I’d have thought seeing that there was a chance that you might win would have helped.”

“Oh, it has. I just hope we can avoid the mistakes that were made along the way.”

Avon drank a swallow and grimaced at the bitter taste. “Things are already different. Their Cally never left, I never left.” _Vila never died_. “Too much foreknowledge isn’t necessarily a good thing, Blake. The best we can hope for is to make the right decisions in the moment.”

“As you do?”

“As _you_ do? Don’t be sanctimonious, Blake. I’m sure Cally would have a saying for you about how we all make mistakes. I don’t. I just hope your mistakes don’t get us killed.”

“From what I gather, it was Avon’s mistake that got other me killed.”

Avon set the cup down sharply, only just avoiding sloshing hot coffee over his hand. “Of course that was all you heard. _Your_ mistake got _our Vila_ killed, Blake. Don’t hold _me_ responsible for something I didn’t do – for something I might never do!”

Blake lowered his gaze. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Avon, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Well. That makes a change.”

“I _am_ capable of apologising.”

“You just choose not to do it very often.”

Blake stared at him and suddenly laughed, the tension between them falling. “It _is_ good to have you back.”

“Yes. Well, at least someone thinks so.”

“What happened to you while you were gone, Avon?”

Avon took hold of the coffee mug again, but he didn’t need to drink any to have a bitter taste in his mouth this time. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have no idea what happened, Blake.”

“I can see it wasn’t pleasant. So, I’m sorry.”

“And now you expect a thank you?”

“Perhaps I have learned to leave well enough alone. Your counterpart… both of them, actually, are…” Blake trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“Broken? Volatile?”

“Something like that.”

“PTSD will do that. Cally used to warn you that we were all too stressed to function. You liked to ignore her.”

“You think we suffer from PTSD?”

“Of course we do, not that it matters. There is no way we can stop until it’s over, or all of us are dead.”

 

Avon nearly ran into Vila on his way back to his cabin and knew immediately that something had happened. Vila darted past him with an expression on his face that Avon never wanted to see again, plainly coming from the direction of his counterpart’s temporary cabin, and vanished into his room with such panicked speed that he didn’t even seem to realise that he had picked his own lock instead of simply unlocking it.

Avon stood in the corridor for a long while, wondering whether he should go after him – or go to see his counterpart. He did neither, in the end, but returned to his own cabin to busy himself with the _Liberator_ ’s programming language and pretend that the raw pain on Vila’s face didn’t matter because it wasn’t _his_ Vila, and he had his own Avon to deal with him.

He met his counterpart first, before he could catch Vila again – intercepted on the way to the flight deck. The other was wearing black, his shoulders held stiffly and his face cast in stone. Avon would have been kidding himself if he had pretended not to recognise the frozen expression.

Abruptly, he regretted pushing his counterpart.

“Avon–”

“Do you mind if I take the watch?”

He sounded chillingly normal – perhaps it was a good thing Avon had been on his own after Anna, with only the antiquated flight computer for company – nothing with any intelligence, artificial or otherwise. “No, of course not. Should I–”

“Stay out of it.” With that, his counterpart limped away.

Avon self-consciously brushed his fingers over his collar bone, then turned to find Cally.

She wasn’t in her cabin or in the rec room. Avon wanted to avoid calling the flight deck if he could, so instead he turned to check the kitchen – to find Cally facing a distraught Vila, his face streaked with tears, red and blotchy. Avon had _never_ seen Vila this upset.

“It’s my _fault_!” Vila exclaimed, batting away Cally’s placating hand.

“What _is_ going on?” Avon asked, glad that he’d got the words out before Vila’s distressed wail at the sound of his voice closed up his throat.

Cally glanced back at him, her face speaking of worry. “Avon, I don’t think you should be here right now.”

But Avon had had enough. He closed the door behind him, stepping further into the room. “What has _he_ done?”

Abruptly, Vila stopped cowering and brushed ineffectively at the tear tracks. “No! It’s _my fault_!”

Avon glanced towards Cally, seeing her shake her head. She didn’t know. He took another careful step closer, bringing himself to Cally’s side. “I know me, Vila.”

The sudden anger in Vila’s eyes came as a surprise – the plain misery was still there, but the rage almost made Avon step back. “Not as well as you think! It _was_ my fault!”

But Avon had seen Vila's face, back in the corridor – worse, had seen the other Avon’s cold, final pain. Cally laid a hand on his arm, and Avon had the impression that she would have telepathed if there had been a way for his counterpart not to hear – but he had no idea what she might have said.

“Vila, you can trust us,” she said out loud, her voice so gentle, so kind.

Vila threw up his hands. “Trust! All right, then, I’ll tell you! It was _my fault_ because after so many years I have finally found a way to _betray Avon_!”

 _You cannot seriously believe he would betray you, after all those years!_ Avon’s mind cruelly, mockingly echoed his own words back at him. With lightening clarity he suddenly knew exactly what had happened, and knew, too, that he had been kidding himself. It had been so easy to trust someone who was dead, to believe that everything would have turned out all right if Avon had only taken the chance – hadn’t life taught him better? “Vila,” he said, and barely recognised the sound as having come from him.

Vila simply broke his gaze. “Leave Avon alone,” he said and brushed past him, the brief touch almost painful.

Distantly, Avon heard Cally call after Vila but she didn’t follow him. Instead, a moment later, her hand was back on his arm. “Avon? Are you all right?”

Avon shook his head and let her steer him to a chair were his legs promptly gave out.

“He wasn’t talking about you, Avon. He isn’t the Vila we knew,” Cally said, missing the point entirely.

“You don’t understand, Cally,” he said faintly, only glad that she and Anna looked nothing alike and that she could never be mistaken for Vila.

“Do you know what happened?”

Avon couldn’t not tell her. “I loved him, Cally – I never got the chance to tell him, but so does _he_. The last person I loved like that wasn’t who I thought she was – she was a Federation agent, and I had to shoot her.” He forced in a breath, still feeling as though he were choking. “Her name was Anna Grant.” He saw immediate understanding in Cally’s eyes and looked away. “I told other me not to make my mistakes. I was wrong. Perhaps we should be glad that _that_ Vila is still alive.”

“Avon!”

“Other me shot her, too. He shot Blake. He tried to kill Vila before. If what Vila says is true – you didn’t see his face earlier. Do you really think he couldn’t – do you really think _I_ couldn’t?”

Cally shook her head. “Oh, Avon… Do _you_?”

He shrugged her hand off, suddenly unable to stand the gentle touch. “If you had asked me three years ago whether I could kill Anna Grant I would have told you that I could never lift a finger against her.”

“Avon,” she said, and the seriousness in her tone made him look up. “Do you think Vila is in danger?”

He thought about it, really thought about it, then shook his head. “No. I didn’t have time to think, before. But perhaps we should keep an eye on them.”

He made to stand, but Cally gently pushed him back down. “I will do that. Have you slept?”

Avon laughed bitterly. “Not very well.” Nightmares, again – of Anna, of Vila.

Cally pressed a small box of medicapsules into his hand. “They help. Get some rest.” She was nearly out of the door when he weighted the pills in his hand and called her back. “Cally, have you been using these?”

Her gaze told him everything he needed to know.


	11. Chapter 11

He didn’t get a chance to try the pills for their effectiveness, of course – Blake’s Cause, as always, had horrendous timing. Avon counted himself lucky that he hadn’t yet swallowed a pill as he struggled into his surface clothes and managed to arrive at the teleport bay just after Blake got there.

He knew the moment he saw the two of them walking into to room; the spring in Vila’s step and the unfamiliar calm in his counterpart’s expression only confirmed it. Avon had worried about Vila coming down with them, in the state he’d been in – but somehow they had settled the issue. Avon had never considered Vila to be overly dramatic in his personal affairs, and he couldn’t claim to understand how they could possibly have reconciled after the fight they had had, but it was obvious that they had – and more. He couldn’t remember having seen that look in the mirror for decades, not even when he’d been with Anna.

He offered a gun belt to Vila, suppressing the sudden, hysterical grin that threatened to break out on his face. “Here. I trust they’ll still fit.”

Vila took it from his hands and pulled a good-natured face. “I haven’t gained that much weight.”

Avon could have laughed with relief at his light tone.

“Besides,” Vila went on, “keep this up and I’ll be as thin as a beanstalk again from all the stress, you’ll see.”

Avon caught his counterpart trailing his fingers down Vila’s arm as he went to sit down – more tactile than Avon had ever considered himself being. He resisted the temptation to joke about what else Vila might be doing now to lose weight and stepped to Blake’s side at the teleport instead.

“Any idea how long you’ll be down there?” his counterpart asked.

“For as long as it takes to convince them to help us,” Blake said, well planned and reassuring as always. “Pylene 50 must be stopped, Avon.”

Somehow, Blake didn’t seem to have an issue with calling them both Avon – Avon didn’t think he’d ever heard him call him River.

“Yes, I know,” the other Avon said. “You might find Dayna rather too enthusiastic.”

Blake calmly rested his hand on the butt of his weapon, making Avon aware that he had already drawn his own. “That’s why I’m taking Vila.”

“Eh?” Vila finally stopped fumbling with his belt – it was all for show, Avon was sure. Vila had changed in quite significant ways, but in others he’d seemed to find it all too easy to fall back to old habits.

“You know Dayna Mellanby,” Blake said with forced patience, “Your insights will be invaluable in the negotiation.”

“Oh, marvellous. Talking politics with a fiery hothead? Are you sure you don’t want to take Avon?”

“Two Avons might cause some confusion,” Blake said, and Avon allowed himself to flash a toothy grin at Vila. He might rather enjoy this, after all.

“Are you _ready_ , Vila?” 

“Yes, yes, all right.” Vila moved into the teleport alcove beside Avon, reluctantly drawing his own gun.

The other Avon, behind the teleport, smiled. “Remember, Vila – between the two of us, _you_ are the diplomat.”

A moment later, the teleport bay faded from view and they rematerialised on a windswept beach, a rocky outcrop in their backs and the taste of salt in the air.

Avon quickly scanned the area, but there were few spaces for concealment. “All clear, it seems.”

Blake nodded and lifted his bracelet. “Down and safe,” he reported, then dropped his arm. “We’ll call in again in an hour, but hopefully we’ll have located Mellanby’s base by then. I’ve had us put down at 0.1 variant – it shouldn’t be far.”

Vila sighed, futilely trying to shake sand off his boots. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

Avon fell into step with him, keeping his gun loosely in his hand. “You sound like you didn’t like her much.”

“Oh, she was all right. Very pretty. Great legs. Very deadly.”

Avon grinned and, once Blake had got a little ahead of them, said: “I don’t understand how you did it, Vila, but I’m glad.”

Vila gave a small, almost dreamy sigh. “Yes, so’m I.”

“Didn’t you think you deserve better?” Avon said only half in jest, scanning the dunes rising to their right.

“No, I think I’ve done fairly well. Why’d you think I stuck around?”

“Nowhere else to go?”

“Nah. I’m Chancellor of Earth, Avon! I could be anywhere. I’ve always like you, you know.”

“Always?”

“Well, since about the time we picked up Cally on Saurian Major. Remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” Avon said, trying to process the information. Just how similar were the Vilas – just how much could he assume to have been true for _his_ Vila?

“Sorry, wrong thing to say?”

Avon was shaking his head when he caught a glimmer of black amongst the scruffy bushes. “Blake, get down!”

Blake, at least, hadn’t lost his reflexes and immediately let himself drop into the sand. The blaster shot whizzed over his head, and Avon had fired at the shooter before he could try again. The Federation trooper slumped over the ridge of the dune and lay still.

“What the hell!” Blake exclaimed, picking himself up.

“Federation – a trap.” Avon let his gun swivel over their surroundings, but found no one else.

“I don’t understand,” Vila said, “she wouldn’t work with the Federation, not Dayna.” Suddenly, his eyes went wide with alarm. “Avon, watch out!”

Avon had already turned, expecting to see another trooper in the distance – but they were right by them, and he found himself in a fistfight with a ranged weapon. He heard Blake getting a shot off behind his back, Vila shouting something, but he couldn’t pay attention to what it was. He kicked up sand, which did nothing to slow the helmeted troopers down, tried to bring his weapon to bear – his vision whited out and a moment later he found himself face down in the sand, a heavy weight on his back, keeping a bruising hold on his left arm.

As best as he could piece together what had happened later, one of the troopers had landed a lucky blow on his shoulder with a shock baton. It might have slowed him down a little, if it had been the right, for which the trooper had probably aimed – his gun arm, after all – but it proved too much for his left. There was little point in feeling bitter about it.

Avon was unceremoniously dragged to his feet and found Blake boxed in between two troopers, Vila pulled along roughly by the arm by a third. They were swiftly herded towards a hatch in the ground not too far away – which, at least, explained how the troopers had managed to get so close, so quickly, not that that made Avon feel much better. Their guns and teleport bracelets were removed as they went, sometime between being propelled down a steep flight of stairs and being herded into a small storage area at gun point. A square shouldered trooper pushed to the front, filling up the doorway. “Well, well. If it isn’t Roj Blake.” He turned his head towards Avon and Vila. “Kerr Avon. And who do we have there?”

“Charming,” Vila mumbled. “Get captured with you lot and they don’t even recognise me.”

“Be quiet, Vila,” Blake said, stupidly.

“Restal!” Avon didn’t need to see the leader’s face to know that he was grinning nastily. “Surely not. The Federation isn’t so easily fooled, Blake.” He waved at two others. “Take him. We’ll get it out of him in no time.”

Avon had taken a protective step forward, in front of the cringing Vila, before he had the time to think it through. A shock baton was immediately extended menacingly in his direction. “You seem to have a bad shoulder, Avon – do you want to try out how much it can stand?”

“Run a DNA analysis. You’ll find that he _is_ Vila,” Avon said, at the same time Blake chimed in with: “You’ll get more information if you talked to me.”

It was pointless – if anything, their protest had made things worse. “I’m sure I can take your word for it,” the trooper chortled, and his entourage pushed Avon to the side, grabbing Vila. “We’ll find out why he’s so important soon enough.”

There was an odd, unfamiliar expression on Vila’s face that made Avon swallow another protest. Vila met his gaze for a moment. “Leave it, Avon,” he said, but Avon wasn’t sure he was really addressing _him_.

A moment later, Vila was out in the corridor and the heavy door was pushed shut. The unmistakable sound of a bolt sliding home had a note of finality.

“We might find something useful in these containers,” Blake said into the silence that followed.

“Like what? A battering ram? Even if we had the means of opening this door, we don’t have the momentum. Damn.”

“The others will rescue us,” Blake said with that calm, irrational certainty that Avon had always found infuriating. Blake folded his arms and stood his ground while Avon paced as best as he could in the cramped room.

“ _What_ others? Blake, your crew currently consists of only Cally and another version of me – one of which will have to stay on board because _you_ managed to lose Orac!”

“I didn’t _lose_ him – and they will manage.”

“They don’t even know that anything is wrong yet.”

Blake frowned. “You don’t seem to have a lot of faith in yourself – and the Avon I remember used to be more level-headed in situations such as these.”

Avon abruptly stopped his pacing, forcing himself to stillness. “Now isn’t the time, Blake.”

“He isn’t our Vila. He’ll be able to handle it until help arrives.”

“Do you think I need to be reminded that he isn’t?” Avon snapped. “Have you ever read Vila’s Federation file, Blake?”

Blake had the decency to look uncomfortable. “No.”

“Well, I have. I can quote it to you, verbatim, and believe me, you don’t want to know. Blake, that was Vila before he even came on board the _Liberator_. Do _you_ know how long those two were enjoying the Federation’s hospitality afterwards? I don’t think this is a case of _practice makes perfect_!”

“These aren’t professional interrogators.”

“No – they’re small-minded, brutal thugs that don’t know how to not kill their victims too soon.” Avon snapped his mouth shut before he could voice what he’d been thinking: _Do you want to be responsible for another Vila’s death?_ He didn’t think _he_ could have looked his counterpart in the eye again, never mind what that would do to the fragile peace he’d built with Blake.

“All right – do you have any ideas?”

Avon looked around the room, over to the door which he couldn’t attempt to open even with the pick in his shoe. “As it happens, I don’t. But you could at least do me the favour of shelving your perpetual optimism and face reality.”

Blake, infuriatingly, smiled. “Duly noted.”

They lapsed into tense silence at that, listening out for sounds from the corridor, from other parts of the base. Once, Avon imagined he’d heard someone scream – but the only real sound they heard was someone tampering with the bolt of the door. Not daring to hope that it was someone friendly, Avon pressed himself against the wall by the door, ready to rush at whoever entered – but when the door opened, the person in question stepped out of his way as if he had known that Avon would be there. It gave Avon long enough to recognise his alter ego in the sudden bright light of the corridor.

“Avon!” Blake exclaimed, sound relieved and not a little smug.

Avon threw him a dark glare, swallowing against the sudden knot in his throat when his counterpart’s eyes scanned the room and found no Vila Restal.

“And me,” a woman chimed from behind Avon – Mellanby. Young and of the sort that enjoyed combat, from Avon’s first impression.

“Where is he?” the other Avon asked, commanding his attention.

“Alive, when I last saw him. They took him for interrogation.”

Mellanby finally noticed him then, exclaiming a startled, “Avon! What is going on?!”

“It’s a long story,” Blake said in that same infuriatingly calm voice – but before Avon could say something, his alter ego beat him to it, barely concealed fury in his voice.

“ _You_ let them take Vila.”

Distantly, Avon thought that he could come across as really menacing, when he sounded like that – but Blake wasn’t fazed. “There was nothing we could have done – they would have shot us and taken him anyway.”

“Oh no. They wouldn’t have shot _you_ ,” the other Avon said with a nasty turn of his lip before turning to Mellanby, hefting his cane. “Where are they?”

“Probably in the main room. It’s by the main entry hatch and has all the equipment.”

They’d come through it on their way here – a fair amount of open space, with entry ways that were partially concealed. It wouldn’t be easy to monitor and defend, which could only work in their favour.

“Let’s go, then,” the other Avon said, not even giving Blake a chance to take charge. It was admirable, really.

Blake had noticed, too: There was a bemused expression on his face as they trailed Mellanby and the other Avon, who moved together as if they’d done so for years – possibly the other Avon had.

A cry of pain, Vila’s, cut sharply through their musings. The other Avon, just ahead of him, went very tense as they stopped near the entry way through which they had come earlier. Mellanby turned back to them, mouthing _five_ , and from a hidden storage compartment in the wall removed two handguns. She offer one to the other Avon, who declined it with a shake of his head, and then passed them on to him and Blake.

Then, not waiting for any further signal, they fell into the room. Mellanby shot two of the troopers seconds after they entered, then veered off to the right to take care of the one that was trying to take aim at them from across the room. Avon fired off a shot at him, then followed Blake to take care of the one that came bursting back into the room from where he’d stood watch in the other corridor.

It was over in seconds.

Avon headed a few steps down the corridor, just to make sure there were no more, and when he turned back, Mellanby was holstering her gun with an expression of grim enjoyment. Avon’s alter ego was in the centre of the room, by the corpse of the fifth trooper, the bulky leader who’d had his neck broken, and caught Vila as he slid limply off the chair.

Avon tore his gaze away, stepping to Blake’s side. “All right?”

“Yes.”

“Roj Blake?” Mellanby said, with a slightly feral grin. “Apologies for the rough welcome.”

“We’re all right,” Blake said – Avon wasn’t quite so sure, his gaze skirting over the cut ropes pooling around the chair Vila’d been on. He avoided looking at Vila himself. His counterpart was shielding him, anyway, leaning back against a small table. 

“Are we done here now?” his alter ego asked suddenly, challenging Blake to meet his gaze.

“Do you have any spare bracelets?” Blake asked softly.

The other Avon pulled off his own bracelet, keeping his arm around Vila. “Take that. Cally will bring you aboard and you can come down with spares.”

Blake took the bracelet and passed it on to Avon, who took it wordlessly, then stepped away to call the ship. “Cally, bring me up.”

It was only when he saw the surprised relief on Cally’s face that he realised she’d thought she’d been teleporting his alter ego. “Avon! Is everything all right?”

“We are all alive. Vila was hurt.” Avon picked up four bracelets, using the task to avoid her gaze. “Put me back down, we’ll let you know when we’re ready.”   

Vila was still unresponsive when he materialised back in the base – seeing him so still felt very wrong, but Avon couldn’t see any significant wounds from the distance.

Blake and Mellanby had been conversing in hushed tones, but stopped when Avon appeared. Avon tossed Blake two of the bracelets without another word and crouched down by his alter ego. The other Avon met his gaze and mutely held out his hand.

Avon passed over the bracelets one by one, watching as the first was fastened around Vila’s wrist – rubbed red and raw. “Is he…?”

“Alive,” was the rough answer. Not _all right_ , Avon noted, feeling ill.

“I’m ready,” the other Avon said, looking beyond him – at Blake, Avon realised, who nodded and called for Cally to bring them up.

Avon stood for the teleport, but his counterpart – and Vila – remained as they had been. The effect was immediate, concern flooding Cally’s face. She pushed out from behind the console to hurry over while Avon went to collect the bracelets. Blake handed it over as a matter of course, but Mellanby gave him a curious glance, as if she expected him to vanish into thin air.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“Well.” She unclipped the bracelet carefully, holding it out to him. “At least _you_ aren’t trying to convince me you’re not Kerr Avon.”

Wry humour he could appreciate – and he had been right, Mellanby relished in fighting, her eyes bright and gleaming and young when Avon had never felt as old, despite his much older counterpart. “Would I stand a chance?”

“Not particularly – though the wanted photos don’t do you justice.”

It was probably meant as a compliment. Cally’s voice interrupted him before he could come up with a response. “Avon, would you?” 

Avon turned away from Mellanby to see what she was asking – not that he was surprised that his alter ego didn’t want to entrust Vila to anyone else.

Blake bent down and lifted the unconscious Vila up – he was probably the only one of them who might have stood a chance of getting Vila down to the medical unit on his own – but even Blake seemed to realise that the other Avon, who was watching intently, wouldn’t allow it.

Carefully, he shifted half of Vila’s unconscious weight onto Avon’s shoulder.  

Cally had risen with him. “Can you do it?”

Not on his own – Vila had never been very light. Avon passed the bracelets to Cally, and turned his gaze back to the newcomer. “Mellanby, why don’t you walk with me?”

The young woman slipped gracefully to his side, hoisting up the rest of Vila’s weight. Together, they made their way into the corridor, Avon directing them towards the medical unit. Cally had fixed a gash in Vila’s cheek with the teleport unit’s first aid equipment, but the blood would need cleaning up, and they needed to put dressings on Vila’s wrist.

After they had lifted Vila onto a bed, Mellanby stood back to let him work. “Now might not be the time to tell me that long story, might it?”

Avon selected the dressings and tried not to think of _his_ Vila’s Federation file. Talking to a stranger might help. “What do you want to know?”

Evidently, Mellanby could play along. “We had word that Restal was dead.”

“He w- is.” _Was_ , so nearly had he said _was_. Vila, that Vila, was _still_ dead, and Avon couldn’t allow himself to think otherwise. “This is a different Vila.”

“A clone?”

“Not a bad guess, but no. He and the other Avon are from a parallel universe. We’re trying to get them back, eventually.” Avon turned to gather up Vila’s hand, and tried not to think that this was the closest he had been to Vila physically since he had met him. It should be the other Avon doing this – where _was_ he? – but there was no point in waiting.

“Eventually?” Mellanby asked, with an arch of her beautiful eyebrows.

Avon allowed himself another wry smile. “Blake’s cause can be… distracting, as I’m sure you’ll find out.”

“Well, if this qualifies as a long story around here, I’m sure there’ll be time for distractions,” Mellanby said, just as Avon got the answer to what was keeping his alter ego: He arrived, supported at either side by Cally and Blake, an expression on his face that Avon had only seen very shortly after he had first arrived on board.

“What happened?” Mellanby asked.

The other Avon let himself be lowered onto a bed before speaking: “I told you, I have an injured knee – Cally, _careful!_ ”

“Mellanby, why don’t you come with me?” Blake said, already laying a hand on her arm. “I fill you in. Avon–”

“I’m staying.”

Blake glanced between him, Cally, the other Avon and Vila, and finally nodded. “All right. Join us on the flight deck later.”

Avon didn’t appreciate the authoritative tone, but he’d let it pass, for now. “Enjoy your tour,” he told Mellanby and close the door after them. “What happened?”

“The damned knee, of course,” his alter ego said, sounding tired. “Ah! Cally!”

Cally had been trying to examine the knee with gentle touches, but now dropped her hands. “I’m sorry, Avon, but I can’t examine you if you won’t let me touch you!”

“There is nothing to examine; I fell, down on that planet. Twice. And the beach doesn’t make for convenient walking. I just need a moment. What about Vila?”

“You weren’t able to support any weight,” Cally said, but the other Avon dismissed her with a gaze firmly fixed on Avon.

“What about _Vila_?”

Avon turned back to the sleeping thief, looking almost at peace now, with the blood gone from his cheek and his wrists wrapped in healing bandages. “Asleep. Will he be all right, mentally?”

His counterpart sighed, a sound just shy of a sob. “I hope so.” He was glaring down at his knee. “Vila certainly has an unfortunate tendency not to be there when you need him.” He shifted, hissed, and glared at Cally. “And no, you don’t need to tell me that I’m being unfair.”

There was something in his eyes that made Avon turn away, even though there was nothing else to look at but the sleeping Vila.

“Vila knows how to handle this,” his alter ego said very softly, and Avon wondered whether he was talking only about the knee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you continue to enjoy this story, here is a friendly reminder that I really appreciate any and all comments, and that they remind me to post new chapters.  
> Also, if you enjoy my fic and want to have an alternative/additional place to show your appreciation (and receive writing updates), find me on my tumblr.


	12. Chapter 12

When Avon left them, after settling them in Vila’s cabin at his alter ego’s exhausted but not unreasonable request, Avon was very much inclined to ignore Blake’s imperiousness and retire to his own cabin, to try to sleep. He felt exhausted, almost as if it had been him that had been tortured.

“Avon, did you sleep?” Cally asked in a murmur as they stood outside Vila’s door, neither of them moving.

“There’re only so many hours in a day, Cally.”

“You look very tired; go sleep.” She gently pushed him towards his cabin, but Avon stood his ground.

“What about Blake’s war council?”

“It will wait a few hours.”

“Try to convince Blake of that.”

“I will.”

“You couldn’t, before.” But when he looked into her face, there was a resoluteness there that he had never noticed before. Had all of them really changed this much?

“I will,” Cally repeated with her customary quiet certainty. “Rest, Avon.”

“Do you think I could?”

“Do you still have the pills I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can. And, Avon – you don’t have to be alone.”

They talked about this, once – about how it was uncommon for Auronar to sleep on their own, how they would usually be joined by their family, their partners, their clone group siblings, for companionship rather than sexual or romantic interest. Avon had told her that it was different, on Earth. “No. Thank you.” He looked past her, towards the flight deck. “And good luck.”

 

His cabin seemed very quiet.

Avon forced himself to shower, washing the Sarran sand from his body and hair – he couldn’t really imagine any more unpleasant quirks of nature than fine pebbles of rock that got everywhere – but at least it made him undress, which he might not otherwise have bothered with. He picked up Cally’s medicine and settled on his bed. There was a data reader in the storage compartments by his head, a little battered and certainly not the latest model, but all in all inconspicuous. Avon wasn’t quite sure why he tortured himself with its presence, but it took a lot of willpower not to pick it up.

He’d tried to find Anna’s file, too, back when he had gone looking, but most of the information had been classified – nothing Orac couldn’t crack, in ordinary circumstances, but circumstances weren’t ordinary when it came to Central Security’s best agent. She probably hadn’t been tortured in the first place – possibly she had been the face behind the mirrored glass, looking on impassively while unspeakable things were done to whoever had been fool enough to cross the Federation. Avon had never claimed to have the best judgement when it came to people – saver to keep them at arm’s length – but he had never been _so wrong_.

A sudden thought – _what if she had been there while_ he – made him sit up, retching. Nothing came up but a bitter taste, which was just as well as he wouldn’t have made it to the bathroom, and it was quickly washed down with a sip of water.

Grimly, Avon shook out one of Cally’s medcapsules and swallowed that, chasing it down with more water.

The sensation of being dragged down to sleep, inescapably, was uncomfortable, terrifying even, too out of control – but he woke hours later without a scream on his lips and his mind mercifully blank. It was almost worth it.

Avon forced himself out into the corridor without bothering to check a clock – someone would be awake and on the flight deck, and it was likely to be Blake. Avon paused for a moment, listening – but of course there were no sounds from Vila’s cabin. You could make yourself heard through the doors and the wall if you wanted to, but the isolation of incidental sounds was nearly complete. Otherwise, the noise of _Liberator_ ’s machines would have been deafening.

If it had just been Vila, he might have knocked. Might not have left him alone in the first place – but it wasn’t just Vila, and it wasn’t _Vila_. Sooner rather than later he would have to let it go.

 

Predictably, it was Blake manning the flight deck. “Avon! Weren’t you resting?”

“I _was_.”

Blake glanced down at the console. “For all of four hours?”

Well. Perhaps he _should_ have looked at a clock. Still, no need to inform Blake that that was the most uninterrupted sleep he had had in… a while. “I suppose you graciously volunteered to take over the watch.”

“I was enjoying some time alone.”

Avon arched an eyebrow – Blake was hardly the person he’d expected such a statement from. “I can leave.”

“No, please.” Blake waved vaguely at the other consoles and the sofa. “Stay.”

Avon slid behind his console, not even trying to convince himself that it wasn’t a grasp for familiarity, for stability he didn’t believe in, least of all on this ship. He just hoped it didn’t show on his expression. “I can take the watch if you like.”

“No,” Blake said, in that tone that indicated that there was something else.

Avon ran a systems’ check and waited.

And there it was: “What happened to you while you were gone?”

It was almost laughable. “What hasn’t?”

Blake was silent for a while, and Avon could feel his eyes on him. He didn’t look up from the console. Finally Blake spoke, softly: “Sometimes, I recognise more of you in your counterpart than in you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Blake.”

“I mean it.”

“You have barely had more than one conversation with other-me.”

“True, though I can’t say I have had many more with you.”

Avon sighed. He looked up from the console, directing his gaze forward towards Zen’s reference point. “All right, I’ll play along. What do you want me to do, Blake?”

“Perhaps I just miss the Avon that would argue with me on everything, as a gauge for when I was right. Avon, _are_ we doing the right thing?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A straightforward one, I had hoped.”

Avon turned to look at him, trying to see whether Blake was serious. But Blake had never been easy to read and he looked serious enough. “Do you want to go back to being a mindless Federation slave? You know that that’s what is happening on every planet subjected to Pylene 50 – the complete eradication of any free will.”

“I know.”

“What, then?”

“You always used to push me – to argue, to make me find a better way.”

“This again? Has it occurred to you to take the lack of argument as a sign of agreement?”

“Yes. Though it feels more as though you are avoiding an argument.”

“You won’t ever be satisfied, will you? Damn you, Blake!” Avon pushed against the console, twisting around so he could face Blake fully. “You never listened to a word I said when I was arguing, and now that I’m not you’re still not happy? You wanted to avoid the mistakes that lead to me shooting you – did it occur to you that _this_ is precisely what got us to that point?”

“I always listened to you.”

“Perhaps you listened, but you never took any advice. When you presented your plans to us, they were already made.”

“Now I am asking for advice!”

Avon tore his gaze away. “I told you, this drug needs to be stopped. A rebel alliance seems the most sensible approach. If we had Orac, we might be able to discover where they manufacture the drug, and you might have got us to blow it up, with what little good that might have done. But the spreading the inoculation might actually stop the Federation in their tracks permanently, for once. _And_ you might finally have an organised community of rebels, with ships, if we’re lucky, or at least some resources. Enough, perhaps, to develop a real antidote.”

“When did you start caring about the success of the rebellion?”

“I didn’t,” Avon spat, glaring at him, “I killed someone I used to care about because they were a Federation agent and spent a week or more losing myself by getting blind drunk! It’s no way to live, and I’d rather be dead. Does that answer your question, Blake?”

Blake sighed. “Sometimes I wish there were someone else to make these choices.”

“You and me, both. If you’re looking for youthful determination, talk to Mellanby, Blake. I just want it finished.”

“It will be. _We_ will finish it.”

Avon looked down at his console, at the systems’ check that had come back without flaws. “Or die trying?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I prefer to think of it as having something to live for. Do you have objections to that?”

“No. But, Blake – don’t drag _them_ into it. It’s not their fight. Not anymore.”

“Protective, Avon?” Blake said, and there was a sudden lighter tone in his voice.

“If you want me to continue believing that we have any chance, don’t get them killed,” Avon shot back, quite serious. “I don’t know what _I_ would do, otherwise.”

“Noted,” Blake responded softly. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Are you any closer to being able to get them back home?” and the conversation moved onto safer, technical waters.

 

It was gratifying to see that he hadn’t been entirely wrong about Mellanby. She was a competent enough leader, it seemed, but she also had the recklessness that came with youth and a definite love for violence. “With a ship like this, we could destroy the factories, stop the production of the drug!”

Avon traded a glance with Blake.

Blake said: “We don’t know the locations, and the Federation would just open another factory. The only way to stop this would be an inoculation and an antidote.”

“Which we don’t have!”

“Yes. We do,” Cally said with her usual calm.

Mellanby stared at her. “You do? But why haven’t you–”

“We have a _formula_ for an _inoculation_ ,” Avon said. “We don’t have the means to mass-produce it, much less spread it across the galaxy.”

“Which is where we hope you would come in,” Blake added, with a charming smile that only made Mellanby frown.

“What a mess.” She shifted and seemed to drop her gung-ho attitude like a piece of clothing. “We lost contact with a lot of groups during the war – we had no idea the _Liberator_ had survived until you turned up, but with these communication stations we can still reach some, spread the word. We could pick up some supplies, too.”

“Supplies?” Cally asked.

“Fresh food, mainly, perhaps some messages. We have a depot in the sector, but we couldn’t take the ship out during the battle. Can I show you?”

“Be my guest,” Blake said, waving his hand towards Avon at the central console.

“Well, it’s at galactic grid reference 23E1 345 5F89.”

“Zen, show us galactic grid 23E1 345 5F89,” Avon instructed, absurdly glad that they hadn’t decided to give Mellanby access to the computer. It wasn’t that he mistrusted her, precisely, but with the luck they had had…

Zen gave his customary _Confirmed_ , making Mellanby jump, and displayed the sector on the front screen and on Avon’s console. “It’s not far, Blake. An hour or so.”

“Very well; Zen, set a course. We might as well pick up what is useable and see whether it can put us back in touch with some of the rebel groups.”

“Meanwhile, there are some we were still in contact with – two independent planets in this sector alone. If you could let me have access to your comms–”

“Cally will give you a hand,” Blake said, in the tone that allowed no argument. “Avon?”

“Oh, be my guest. I should get on with going through Zen’s logs, anyway.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 13 for good luck for the New Year! :P  
> But seriously, this chapter has one of my favourite scenes of this whole fic, so enjoy, and, as always, don't hesitate to let me know how you're getting on with this fic in the comments!

Avon didn’t really expect to make any progress with the logs in their mission to try and find out which command had sent the _Liberator_ into a different universe. When, miraculously, he did, he still waited until Cally had been to see them before using it as an excuse to see Vila.

Vila seemed… fine. It was the sort of _fine_ that came with hurt he seemed determined to ignore, though the other Avon watched his every move. Meanwhile, Vila seemed happy to throw himself into fussing around the other Avon in return. Yes, his counterpart didn’t look precisely healthy, and even the little walking around the room that he did looked to be profoundly painful, but Avon couldn’t shake the feeling that it was Vila who really was unwell.  

Still, Vila’s response was unvaryingly, “I’m fine,” accompanied by a small smile.

Avon might not have the faintest idea what had happened to Vila while he and Avon had been in Federation imprisonment after Avon had shot Blake, but he had read his Vila’s file, often enough to have it echo verbatim in his head. He knew Vila wasn’t _fine_. But it was hardly his place.

So he sat and talked computers with his counterpart, while Vila roamed restlessly through the cabin, stood in the open doorway, looking out into the corridor but never stepping outside, or sitting by the other Avon’s side, ostensibly listening, but absentmindedly rubbing his wrist and starting when Avon’s counterpart spoke his name.

Avon wished he could have spoken to either of them individually – to Vila, to find out if there was anything he could do to help; to Avon, to find out whether Vila was getting better – just to feel that he was doing something. But it was impossible; they would not leave each other’s side. Not that Avon blamed them for that.

Unravelling the encryption around the command was tedious work. They couldn’t draw on Zen’s help, as Zen didn’t even seem to be aware of the data set – some additional protection, no doubt. Orac, of course, was gone. Avon felt like he was trying to scale an impossible mountain of trying to understand Zen beyond what Zen itself understood, of trying to catch up with knowledge about its programming that seemed self-evident to his counterpart but was new to Avon. He enjoyed the work, in a strange way – it was preferable to Blake’s tactical conversations that went nowhere. They were still contacting rebel forces, spreading the word of a meeting, trying to find a location for it. Destiny looked to be it, for now. Nothing that particularly needed Avon’s attention – he had certainly never claimed to have a gift for diplomacy – and nothing that he felt the need to object to. A meeting was dangerous, of course, but they couldn’t spread the inoculation on their own. As soon as they started at one end, the Federation would know and take countermeasures. They might not be able to destroy the _Liberator_ , but they could keep her from being effective.

Working on the encryption kept Avon busy, and if he worked while his counterpart slept, he could make some contribution and not feel too bad when his counterpart managed to make twice as much progress whenever _he_ looked at the data.

Still, it was tedious work, and when Avon found his eyes drifting shut over it as he reclined in the recreation room, he allowed himself to drift into a doze, just for a little while. It was rare enough that he felt sleepy…

He woke with a scream at the tip of his tongue and a warm hand on his shoulder. When he snapped open his eyes to find Vila’s concerned face, he was, for a terrible moment, convinced he was still dreaming. Then he noticed the greying hair and the unfamiliar lines of age and the realisation was followed by a wild wish that he were still dreaming, if only because if this were a dream, he could have… “Vila,” he said, trying to dislodge the urge to scream from his throat, “decided to leave your cabin?”

Vila tilted his head and ignored the question. “Are you all right?”

Two could play at that game. “Where is other me?”

Vila gave in. “Asleep. Here.” He held out the digital reader on which Avon had been studying the encryption – it must have slipped from his hand when he had fallen asleep. It wasn’t _the_ reader, of course. Avon had put that back behind the panel under his bed, to make it easier to resist the temptation.

Avon took the reader back, cleared his throat and sat up straighter. “Thanks.”

“Not like you, to fall asleep in public.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be for my Avon,” Vila said, rocking back onto his heels.

“No, you’re right. It isn’t.”

“Nightmares.” It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact.

“Yes. You would know, of course.”

“I think I can tell, by now,” Vila answered, with a gentle grin. “Avon, I’m sorry.”

“What for? And you really needn’t call me Avon.” Avon swung his legs down from the recliner, to give him something to do before he could look at Vila’s face and make himself take the words back.

“Avon,” Vila said again, and suddenly his hand was on Avon’s arm, sure and heavy and warm. A cold shudder ran down Avon’s back. “I love you, you know.”

If there had been anywhere to go, Avon would have flinched back.

“No, don’t go and protest,” Vila forged on in a rush, “I know you’re not him, and he isn’t you, and he’s been telling me that none of you are the same, but I _remember_ – Avon, I remember when he used to be you, and I can’t… I can’t look at you and not feel anything and I can tell when you hurt and I’m sorry,” Vila wound down, his voice barely above a whisper.

Avon tightened his grip on the reader, afraid that if he relaxed his hand even a fraction, it would slip from nerveless fingers. “Why tell me that?”

“We’re not staying,” Vila said, as if that were an explanation.

“I know.”

“Which means I’ll be gone. I’ll really be gone.”

“I never really got to know you. There is no guarantee that I… that we would…” Avon swallowed hard and pushed himself abruptly to his feet. “This is pointless.”

Vila was on his own feet an instant later. “Avon, you need to let yourself grieve.”

“Sage advice from a fool?”

“If you like. You could think of it as good advice from a friend.”

“Vila–”

“How long has it been, Avon?”

“Since when?”

“Don’t do that.”

Avon twisted away, bringing the seat between them. “About two months since Anna. Nearer a year since Vila.”

“Bet you didn’t once pause to catch your breath in all that time.”

Avon nearly laughed. “Why should I want to do that?”

“Because it’s not healthy! Dammit, Avon, I know you! You’ll destroy yourself! I don’t want that to happen when I’m gone! I don’t want you to end up losing Cally, shooting Blake!”

_Losing Cally?_ Avon hoped that the surge of panic didn’t show on his face, not that he was looking Vila in the eye. “I’m not going to shoot Blake.”

“My Avon wasn’t exactly planning to, either! But he might not have if we’d been speaking to each other, but I won’t even be here so you’ll have to do it on your own!”

“Keep your voice down. I’m fine, Vila.”

Vila lowered his volume, but his eyes still sparked fire. “No, you’re not. But I want you to be and I know you can be. You’re stronger than you think.”

“Vila, I read your Federation file.”

Vila was silent for just a moment longer than he should have been. “Oh. What does that have to do with anything?”

“How did you do it? How did you go through all of that and survive? Vila, after all that, what is there to _live for_?”

“Don’t ask that.”

“You wanted to help. I’m asking. Vila, please.”

Vila looked up again, unexpectedly catching Avon’s eyes. He found himself caught in the pain behind Vila’s. “You live because if you don’t they’ll have won. You live because if you give in, if you let them change you, if you let them influence who you are, you let them win. You live because the best way to defy them is to be you. You live because if you don’t they might as well have killed you. You live because that’s the only way to not let them win. You just live.” Vila dropped his gaze. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it.” Vila shrugged. “I’m sorry, Avon. There is no grand magic trick. You just carry on and eventually, some day, you start to believe in hope and happiness again. But you knew that already, too, or you wouldn’t be standing there.”

“I nearly…” He couldn’t bring himself to complete the sentence.

“I know. So did he.” Vila watched him for a long moment. “Avon, if you think it’ll help, promise me. Promise me that whatever happens, you’ll carry on. Promise me that whatever happens, you won’t let them win. Give me your word.”

“My word? Vila–”

“I know what it means to you. If you don’t want to promise Cally, or Blake, if you’d rather promise someone who’s dead, someone who could never betray you, promise _me_.”

Swallowing against a knot in his throat, Avon held out his hand over the recliner, towards Vila. It was shaking, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. “All right.”

Vila clasped his hand, squeezing. His was steady.

“I give you my word, Vila. Whatever happens.”

“Thank you.” Vila gave a small, lopsided grin. “I’ll hold you to it.”

Avon laughed, helplessly, and when he let go of Vila’s hand the shaking had stopped.

 

After the conversation with Vila, Avon finally found the courage to really return to the Wanderer – not just to get a quick download of the log, but to make sure the ship was capable of flight. They would take it with them on the return jump, of course, to eliminate a variable that could potentially make all the difference, even though it was the _Liberator_ that had initiated their journey across the universes. Once they had managed to get back, the other Avon and Vila might just find themselves in need of a ship – the _Liberator_ wouldn’t be staying, couldn’t stay, but they were fairly sure that anything outside of the _Liberator_ ’s field would remain behind, regardless of which universe it had come from originally.

As he stood in the Wanderer, it occurred to Avon for the first time that he had never considered going back with them – that Blake had never mentioned anything of the sort, either. It would have been a way to leave everything behind – leave the Federation behind, the need to fight behind. Avon hadn’t really had the time to consider what he might do while they were there, but not for the lack of options. Perhaps, subconsciously, neither of them was as ready to abandon the fight as they had thought.

“Making progress?”

Avon whirled around on the small flight deck and found his counterpart standing in the entrance, leaning against the doorframe to take weight off his leg. Vila, for once, wasn’t in sight.

Avon sighed, tapping the probe he’d been using against his palm. “Well, I finally managed to fix the flight computer. No progress on the engines, and I haven’t even started on the weapons.”

“We probably won’t need those.”

“Are you going to take that chance?”

His counterpart gave a crooked smile and limped further onto the flight deck, relying heavily on his stick for balance. “Perhaps not, but I think we can prioritise the engines.”

“If we can find the parts. I had to do some creative wiring just to get this ship to Earth.”

“Well, I learned a thing or two about _Liberator_ ’s self-repair circuits. I think we’ll manage.”

“Your optimism is gratifying, but you haven’t seen the damage. I barely made it.”

His counterpart narrowed his eyes, lowering himself into the flight seat. “Would you believe that I have done more work on a Wanderer class engine than on the _Liberator_ ’s?”

“Went down in the world, did you?”

Other-Avon grinned. “Something like that. It wasn’t the same size of ship, but I imagine the original engine won’t be too different.”

“The _original_ engine?”

The other shook his head. “Chances are you won’t find out.”

He wasn’t going to tell him. After Vila’s slip of the tongue about Cally, Avon wasn’t sure he wasn’t grateful not to know. “Well, nothing is going to fix itself if we just stand here. I need to take inventory before I’ll even know where to start.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“Are you just going to sit there?”

“I am _not_ going to squeeze into crawlspaces. Perhaps you should have left the computers to me.” 

“I didn’t ask for company.”

“No. Ah, there you are.” His counterpart’s gaze went right by him, and when Avon turned, Vila was peering into the flight deck.

“I’m not an errant boy, you know,” Vila said, stepping in. “Hello, River,” he added with a nod and gentleness in his eyes.

Avon returned the nod.

“What do you think?” his counterpart asked.

Vila examined the room. “It doesn’t look like much. Why do you want this reader here?”

“Give it to River.”

Vila held out a reader to Avon, looking no less surprised than what Avon imagined must be visible on his own face.

He took the device, activating the screen. “What’s this?”

“Your inventory.”

Avon scrolled down, incredulous. The inventory was meticulously ordered, sortable by component and the system it belonged to. It was a daunting list, as he had expected, but the fact that he no longer had to make the list would save him hours of painstaking work. “How?”

“I gave Zen the specifics of this ship class and had it compare them to the sensory scans. It’s probably not perfect since there will be individual adjustments, but it should give us a good idea.”

Vila stepped to the other Avon’s side. “Is this the part where I pretend that I know what you two are talking about?”

For the first time since he had met him again, Avon felt comfortable ignoring Vila. “A good idea,” he said, meeting his counterpart’s smile.

“I thought so.”

Vila made a sound that was suspiciously close to a snort, drawing both their attention. “Shame,” he said, “that Blake never appreciated your flare for the dramatic.”

“Shut up, Vila,” other-Avon said, good-naturedly, and pushed himself to his feet. He waved his free hand at the reader. “Some of these components have equivalents on the _Liberator_. I can set up the self-regeneration system to generate them on the other side of the airlock. That will save me from the crawlspaces, anyway.”

Avon nodded and went back to scanning the list. “Thanks.”

“Need a hand?” Vila asked. The silence that followed the question registered in the same moment that Vila added: “River?”  

Avon glanced up to meet his counterpart’s gaze, finding nothing but calm there. He looked over to Vila, whose hand was hovering just beside his elbow, not quite touching. “If you have nothing better to do.”

“Well, that’s a change. _You_ would have just ordered me around,” Vila commented dryly, prompting another quicksilver grin from Avon’s counterpart.

“You weren’t usually given to volunteering,” he shot back and, with a quick brush against Vila’s arm, turned towards the door. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Avon watched him go before he gave in to the urge to clear his throat. “Vila, you don’t have to spend time with me.”

“No, I want to. I’ve had enough of politics. Do you know that Day– _Mellanby_ and Blake are still at it?”

“I know.”

“Right, that’s why you’re down here.”

It was almost eerie, having Vila in this space, alive and talking, rather than the spectre that had haunted him on the journey back. “The ship needs to be repaired. We have no idea what forces it was exposed to during the jump; it might have been pure chance that it survived, the state it was in. I’m all for improving its chances on the way back, aren’t you?”

“Where do we start?”

Avon set the reader aside and opened up the maintenance access panel, waving Vila over. “You see that wiring? I stripped it from the weapons to keep the engine going, but it’s not designed to hold so powerful a charge. With the ship in dock, we can take them out and replace them.”

Vila made a face. “That’s a mess.”

“Yes, well. I was on my own and didn’t have much to work with. I was surprised to have made it – now there’s a thought. I wonder what the people in your universe would have thought if they found me drifting in space.”

“Depends on whether they’d have recognised you. Avon doesn’t have much of a public profile, not anymore, and barely anyone who’d recognise the pictures from the Federation’s wanted list is still around.”

Avon began to disconnect the cannibalised wires, trying not to dwell on the hazy, sleepless hours in which he’d put them there. “Good,” he said to Vila.

“Yes, I thought you’d like that. We could both do with a little less public involvement, too.”

“What’s stopping you?”

Vila passed him a probe without prompting – Avon glanced at it and found it to be the correct one, to his quickly supressed surprise – and settled back against the bulkhead by Avon’s side. “I’m Chancellor, and there’s no one else to do it, not yet. We can’t just leave.”

Avon had turned to cut the connections he couldn’t loosen by hand but now stopped, with a sigh of understanding. “Ah.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think I understand what your argument when we first met was about.”

“Well, yes; we were being stupid.”

“You would rather be together.”

“Took us a while to figure that one out.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Avon said, so quietly he barely even heard his own voice. “I think you’ve both known that for a very long time.”    

“I asked him to marry me,” Vila responded, a peculiar note of wonder in his voice.

Avon tensed despite himself and then forced himself to let the tension out slowly so it wouldn’t look like a flinch. Gripping the laser cutter tight, he focussed on the connections. “I’m not your relationship councillor, Vila.”

“Sorry. Too much information?”

Avon lay down the tool, sitting back on his heels. He couldn’t focus, not like that. “No use in dwelling on something I can never have.”

“Yeh? It was me that told you to grieve, remember?”

Avon rubbed a hand over his face, his gaze locked into mid-distance so he wouldn’t be tempted to turn his head and look at Vila. “Like I did when I was alone in this ship and drank myself into a stupor?”

“What? No, that’s not healthy, that.”

“You don’t say.”

Vila’s breath whistled sharply through his teeth. “You need us gone.” Avon heard him climb to his feet. “I’m sorry. I wanted to help, but I’m making it worse, aren’t I. I’m stopping you from moving on.”

“Vila, I–”

“Don’t apologise! Don’t apologise to _me_ , Avon! Other-me went and died on you; you owe me nothing!”

Avon came to his feet, too, finally facing him, suddenly angry. They’d always been the same size – but this Vila didn’t try and hide it. “Vila died saving all our lives. I can’t blame him for that, and I won’t feed into your skewed relationship with guilt. My feelings are mine, and my problem – I’m not your project to fix, nor yours to feel guilty over if you fail!”

Avon watched defiance flare in Vila’s eyes, but it wasn’t voiced in the way he’d expected. “Congratulations, Avon, you figured out that I’m not healthy, happy Vila anymore,” Vila spat, his voice as cold as Avon’s could be. “And you’re right, of course. You’re always right, aren’t you? So what if I don’t deal well with the thought that Avon might not need or want me anymore? _You_ asked for my help!”

“Yes, and you _did_ help, and I’m grateful – if I hadn’t met you, I might already have self-destructed, Blake or no Blake. And yes, I wanted your company, because it helped, for a while. But it stops there. I refuse to be the foil for your fears about your relationship with _him_.”

“What fears? We’re happy. We might get married!”

“ _What fears_?” Avon laughed sharply. “Who are you and what have you done to Vila Restal?” He sobered instantly, staring Vila down. “The same fears that all of us have. The same fear that drove you into that panic attack Cally and I found you in – the same fear that keeps you from seeing that _he_ needs you – that he will _always_ need you. The fear that you will fail – fail _him_.”

“Avon doesn’t need anybody,” Vila said, but his tone was flat, and he wouldn’t meet Avon’s gaze.

“Is that right? Did he repeat it so often that you started believing the lie? Or is that just what you tell yourself about him so you can justify trying to fix me – because I _do_?”

“Stop it! Avon, stop it!”

Vila’s shout reverberated in the suddenly silent flight deck. He’d turned away, his shoulders stiff and tense.

Avon sighed. He hadn’t imagined that he would ever speak to Vila with the harshness that he used to reserve for Blake’s most hare-brained schemes, but then he had never thought that he would _ever_ speak to Vila again. “I’m sorry, Vila. But I don’t think I’m wrong, am I?”

Vila’s shoulders drooped. “No.”

“I’m not an expert in relationships – I’m not an expert when it comes to _emotions_ , but I have a feeling that your relationship with Avon will be better if you acknowledge this. Don’t run away from happiness, Vila. None of us deserve it, but we should take it when we get the chance. Have you forgotten what it’s like to be a thief?”

Vila turned around then. There was a sheen to his eyes, but his expression was calm. “I didn’t think happiness could be stolen.”

“If it can be stolen _from_ you, which I think we both know that it can, it only stands to reason that, being a thief–”

“I can steal it for myself?” Vila’s gaze flittered over Avon’s face for a moment, then he surged forward and pulled Avon abruptly into a hug.

Avon gently rested a hand on his shoulder, and when Vila stepped back, it was as though he had finally been able to let go of something, too.


	14. Chapter 14

“Avon, do you have a moment?”

Avon looked up from _Liberator_ ’s central flight console at Blake’s pensive tone. “I’m on watch. As long as no pursuit ships decide to attack us, I’m not going anywhere. If you meant to relieve me, you are… two hours early,” he added, consulting the console’s chronometer.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“So talk. Beating around the bush doesn’t become you, Blake.”

Blake began pacing up and down at the front of the flight deck. Avon could already tell he wasn’t going to like this and stepped down to his own console, where he felt more at home. He wasn’t entirely sure why he felt uncomfortable at the central controls – perhaps it was the way in which his counterpart had stood at them, proprietarily at ease. It wasn’t as though he didn’t consider part of the _Liberator_ to be his, but he knew that, in the other universe, that sense of ownership had grown in the absence of Blake, and that it ultimately had ended in disaster. He didn’t need or want to know the details.

“Have you talked to Vila and Avon about what happened to them after – well, in our future?”

“It’s not _our_ future, Blake. Look at how many factors have already changed. I have no particular urge to shoot you right at this moment, if that is what you’re worried about.”

Blake smiled faintly. “It’s not. I was thinking about how we wouldn’t know about Pylene 50 if they hadn’t said anything, and how much more information they might have that could really help us.”

Avon paused in his absentminded monitoring of his console and looked up at him. “I see where this is going. Don’t, Blake.”

“Think how much help they could be! Up to now, we’ve been guessing blindly. We’ve been _losing_ – now, for the first time, it feels like we might have an edge on the Federation again!”

“I told you: Foreknowledge is a dangerous thing, Blake. Remember Orac?”

Blake nodded vaguely, but Avon could see that he wasn’t convinced. “Even so, their combined expertise – Avon’s technical knowledge and Vila’s gift for locks –”

Avon swallowed hard. He stepped out from behind the console, deliberately walking into Blake’s way, cutting off his pacing. “You should have thought about that before you risked our Vila’s life. They aren’t your pawns and they aren’t staying, Blake.”

“Not this argument again, Avon!”

“What argument? That your schemes got Vila killed? It’s a fact, Blake, one that I am prepared to no longer hold against you, but I won’t let you drag those two into your planning. I don’t care how valuable they might be – they need to be back in their universe, the sooner the better.”

“But aren’t you curious? Think of what you could learn from the other Avon – think of all the technology, all the insight, the contacts–”

“Tools for your crusade, you mean? And no – I can’t say that I want to know more than I already do. A little foreknowledge is a dangerous thing,” he repeated.

Blake wouldn’t be swayed. “But they won – they beat the Federation! If they could tell us how – if we could convince them to stay with us, just until it’s done, until it’s over…”

“And how long is that going to take? I won’t let you do this, Blake. I’d rather leave with them.”

That, finally, gave Blake pause. He studied Avon for a moment, then frowned and shook his head. “But with their help we could do it so much faster. Think of the errors, the bloodshed we might be able to avoid. Don’t you see, Avon?”

“Oh yes, I _do_ see,” he said. “But you can’t do it.” He would have repeated that he wouldn’t let him, for the sake of the other Avon and Vila, but there was movement in the corner of his eye, and Vila, as if on cue, smoothly stepped onto the flight deck.

“Something I missed?” Vila asked with such fake brightness that Avon knew he had been listening. How much had he heard?

“Nothing of importance, Vila,” he told him, determined that it wouldn’t be a lie. He had resigned himself to the fact that his fate was bound up with Blake’s, that he had nowhere else to go until it was all over, one way or another, but those two didn’t belong, and if he could do anything for Vila, for both Vilas, it was to ensure that one of them could be happy, and if he had to override Zen to force Blake’s hand then so be it.

“Oh, good, then,” Vila chimed blithely, every bit the thief that they had known – but Avon knew that there was a man who had handled Earth’s politics behind the façade. He almost would have enjoyed seeing Vila manipulate Blake, for a change.

“Say, Blake,” Vila went on, as if he had taken to reading Avon’s mind, “you wouldn’t know what Mellanby is cooking up in the cargo hold, would you? There were some very strange noises.”

Blake looked shaken and Avon could see him wrenching himself back together. That was right – Blake had not spent as much time with this Vila as Avon had, he wasn’t used to this new Vila who could be so much like the one they had known and yet so entirely different. “I’m sure it’s only weapons practice, Vila,” Blake said and really had to be congratulated on his ability to put on an unflappably neutral face at a moment’s notice.

“Well, check, would you? It’s making me nervous.”

“All right, Vila, I will check.” Blake threw one final dark glare back at Avon as he walked out – nothing like the calmness he’d shown Vila. The argument wasn’t over, but Vila’s timely entry might have meant a point for Avon.

Avon released a pent up breath and wondered whether he should get back to the calm routine of the watch – but Vila was in his way, leaning against the force wall generator.

“Will you tell me what that was about?” he asked, sounding gentle, but no longer putting on the over the top friendliness that was so like the Vila Avon had known – or rather, the mask that Vila had liked to show them.

“No,” Avon told him. “It needn’t concern you.”

“Right. You’d feel better if you did, you know.”

Avon really wasn’t in the mood to have _that_ argument again. “I’m not _your_ Avon, Vila,” he reminded him sharply.

Vila shrugged, conceding the point. “That doesn’t mean it won’t make you feel better.”

Avon forced himself to walk past him, going back to his station and the test he had been running. “No, Vila. Now go and find company elsewhere.” It would be better if he was alone – if Vila went to other-him. Avon could not allow himself to rely on Vila to be there, didn’t even want to get into the habit. It would be better if they left, and soon. Perhaps, later, he could speak to Cally instead, though he wasn’t sure whether he was entirely comfortable with this new need to… well… need people.

 

The run-up to the great rebel gathering kept them busy – and kept them distracted from working on a way to get other-Avon and Vila back home. Avon tried not to hold Blake accountable for it. It might be in Blake’s interest to delay their departure, but they weren’t going anywhere until the gathering was over and done with, anyway, and the influx of messages of greeting was hardly Blake’s idea. At least the greeters were cautious and encrypted their messages.

“Avon! You’re still working!”

Avon looked up from his handheld at Cally’s voice and noticed, for the first time in hours, the meal that had cooled on the plate before him, uneaten. Ah well. “The messages are still coming.” He leant back, carefully rolling his shoulders, working through the stiffness he had become used to.

“You should at least have eaten.”

“Yes, I know.” He looked ruefully at the plate. “I didn’t mean to forget.”

Cally wordlessly took the uneatable mess away and came back from the synthesiser with a plate of sweet pancake-like things that she seemed to like. They were good enough, though Avon had always wondered how she could eat something that so looked like the moondisk she used to keep. Cally set the plate down between them. “I will share,” she said, in that tone that really was an order for him to eat, or else.

Avon allowed himself a small, tired smile. He sent off the latest decrypted message to Blake for reading when he woke in the morning and put the pocket computer to the side. “The messages all seem harmless enough.”

“Is that a problem?” Cally asked, rolling up the first of her pancake things between her fingers. “Surely we don’t want any trouble at the meeting.”

“No. Maybe it’s my naturally suspicious nature. Or maybe I have a feeling that other-me is looking for _something_.”

“Have you asked him?”

“No. I’m not sure I want to know.”

“But if it is a danger to us–”

“Oh yes.” Avon took one of the not-pancakes, tearing a mouthful-sized piece off it. “If only we had their knowledge and expertise? I’m not sure that I want it, and I’m not sure that it would be wise for them to share. Have you talked to Blake?”

Cally nodded. “Yes. Their knowledge could be useful – it has been, already – but I agree: they shouldn’t stay. It has been good to see Vila again, and I should have liked to get to know them better, but they should not be forced. They want to return to their universe, and we must honour their wishes, if possible.”

“Oh, it’s possible. It just takes time to work it out, time we can’t take at the moment.” At least the repairs of the Wanderer had progressed with astonishing speed, thanks to other-Avon’s stroke of genius with both the repair inventory and the use of _Liberator_ ’s auto-repair. As it was, Avon had begun to find the work almost relaxing: It was routine enough not to be straining and still engaging enough not to be boring, just the thing for when he needed some time to himself but didn’t want to – or couldn’t – sleep.  

Cally and he shared the meal for a little while in silence, until Avon had had enough and was debating whether to pick up the handheld again or head into his cabin to sleep and Cally asked: “Has something changed, Avon?”

Avon paused, surprised. “Everything changes, all the time. It’s one of the very few constants. Were you thinking of something specific?”

“Just an impression.”

“I’m tired, Cally. Make your point.”

“You seem… better.”

“Better?”

“Yes. More yourself, more at peace.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

Avon gathered up the handheld and stood, pushing his chair back. “If you say so.”

“It’s a good thing.”

“I made a promise,” Avon said, not entirely sure why he was telling her and not wanting to elaborate, “let’s just hope I don’t end up regretting it. I’m going to bed – you better wake other-me.”

Cally nodded, smiling as though his words had told her more than he had intended to say. She didn’t bring it up again.

 

With Cally on their side, Avon hoped that the argument with Blake would be at an end – only of course hours later he was torn from too light and too short sleep because his counterpart had decided that a concern grown from his experience was too important for the safety of the meeting to keep secret. At least, if Blake felt vindicated, he didn’t say anything while they were gathered on the flight deck. Perhaps the vagueness of the threat had taken the wind out of his sails.

Avon couldn’t exactly claim to be surprised that Vila and his counterpart wanted to go down to be at the meeting – after all, of all of them, they held the most information about Pylene 50, even if their identity had to remain a secret. He _was_ surprised that Cally volunteered to remain on board. After all, she had the most stake in the matter, after the destruction of Auron. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree that two people should remain on board – he had suggested it, after all, and it was a pitiful crew compliment at any rate, if there was a battle – just that he hadn’t quite thought as far as who the second person might be. He, of course, had to stay, if other-him was going down. The age difference would offer some disguise, but not if both Avons attended side by side.

On the scanners, Avon observed the slow arrival of the delegates, hoping that no one else was doing the same. Not equipped with teleports, most ships made a landing on Destiny’s surface – soon, very few ships but the _Liberator_ would remain in orbit, but the presence of the _Liberator_ alone could raise suspicion. They really should have taken her out of orbit, but that would have meant stranding Blake, Mellanby, Avon and Vila down on the planet. Avon had known he wasn’t willing to risk it if he had any choice the moment he had teleported them down.

“Why did you not want to go down?” Cally asked suddenly, breaking sharply through the silence.

“Someone had to remain on board. I’m not a diplomat. Why didn’t _you_?”

“I didn’t want to witness a dispassionate discussion of my planet’s total annihilation.”

Avon leant back in his chair, resting his eyes for a moment. “Knowing Blake, I doubt it is going to be dispassionate. I just hope they don’t take too long with it.”

The constant state of alert was as boring as it was draining. When a call came in from one of the bracelets, it was almost a relief, and Avon thought he’d heard Cally release a deep breath of tension before she took it.

“Here,” she said simply, not identifying the ship or the caller.

It was Avon’s counterpart, of course. “We found a homing beam transmitter, so we might have to expect company.”

Avon ran a scan for transmission immediately, but he couldn’t find anything now – probably his counterpart had destroyed the transmitter, but if Zen had picked anything up earlier, it would have alerted them. Perhaps the transmitter had not been inconspicuous, but it had been stealthy. It could only mean trouble.

“Federation?” Cally asked.

“Probably,” came the answer from the planet. “At any rate, keep an eye out for ships and let us know as soon as there is anything. We will need time to evacuate.”

Without seeing him, Avon was surprised at the tone of his counterpart’s voice – the tone of someone who had, for better or worse, got used to leading and giving orders. “Nothing on the long range scanners yet,” Avon said, just to hear his own voice in his head, in his mouth. He had got used to hearing his own voice played back a long time ago, but this was disconcerting. “We’re monitoring,” he added, as if there was any doubt.

“Good,” his counterpart said simply.

“If someone shows up, I’m undocking my ship and taking _Liberator_ out of orbit,” Avon added, making a choice. In orbit, they were sitting ducks for anyone who decided to shoot at them. If they had to fight, they had to take her out for manoeuvrability. Perhaps they would spot any enemy ships soon enough to draw them away before they realised where the _Liberator_ had been. His counterpart’s detection screen was still active…

“We can’t strand them, Avon!” Cally protested, cutting through his thoughts.

“We will be back. We are the only ship here that can distract a Federation flotilla for long enough to allow these ships to scatter. We have the detector shield and the superior speed, Cally.” Hadn’t he just wondered whether he could sound like a leader, like someone used to giving orders? “It’s what _he_ would do – isn’t it?”

“Yes,” his counterpart agreed promptly. “Cally, the _Liberator_ must not fall into the hands of the Federation. Regardless of what happens down here – remember that.”

Avon could see that Cally’s thoughts had run along the same tracks, but she still set her jaw stubbornly. “It might not come to that. We will do what is necessary, _if_ it is necessary, and we _will_ come back for you.” She looked over at Avon, as if in challenge, but he only nodded. He had asked for nothing else.

“Thank you,” his counterpart said and signed off.

Cally frowned at her console. “I don’t like the thought of stranding them, Avon.”

“I know, but we have a better chance away from the planet, where we can keep the Federation occupied. There are a lot of ships down there – if necessary, one of them will take them.”

“Blake wouldn’t leave any of us without teleport in a crisis.”

“Yes he would, if the ship were in danger. He has done so before.”

“But we could just pick them up as soon as any ships show on the scanner.”

“And disrupt the meeting? I don’t like it either, Cally, but we shouldn’t be in orbit as it is! The _Liberator_ ’s presence only draws attention to Destiny. Detector shield or not, they will already know that we are in the area. They probably have even picked up on the message transfer spike.” He ran a fresh scanner sweep. “Nothing yet, but we better prepare for battle.” And on that note – “Zen, put the battle computers online. I want a constant scan and want to know immediately if any ships show up. And take us out of geostationary position; I don’t want anyone creeping up on us in planetary blind spots.”

And then they went back to waiting, tenser than before but equally as silent. Avon was absently rubbing at his shoulder when the first plip showed up on the scanner scope and Zen promptly announced the ships’ arrival. Cally was already on her way to the comms before Avon could do so much as wave at her.

There was a pause before the answer and it was, again, his counterpart they managed to reach. He took the call with his name – he was alone, then.

“Cally – Avon, there are Federation ships on the long range scanners. They are too far out yet to have scanned the ships in orbit, so we’re taking the _Liberator_ out with the detector screen on and will lure them away. We will be back once we have lost them.”

One thing had to be said for Cally – she might not like the plan, but she didn’t let her emotions rule her pragmatism. Avon released the docking clamps, dropping the Wanderer smoothly into Destiny’s orbit.

“How many ships, Cally?” Avon’s counterpart asked.

Cally looked over at him, and he mouthed the number at her. He saw rapid emotions flash over her face – he wasn’t happy either. “We will be fine,” she said, to his counterpart.

“How many?”

“Too many to destroy.”

“Damn,” other-Avon swore with feeling. Avon could only agree.

“We will be fine, Avon,” Cally said, sounding surer than she looked.

“As long as the Federation fleet doesn’t split up. The ships we have here aren’t battle ships. We won’t even have them in orbit if we first hear that any Federation ships are coming for us from the Destiny satellite grid.”

It was true – if the fleet split up, everyone at the meeting would die.

“If they split up, we will come back,” Cally said. “If not, we will return once we have lost them. That should delay them long enough.”

Avon raised the force wall and moved to the central controls, waving her towards the weapons.

“I will have to go soon, Avon,” she told his counterpart on the planet.

“All right.” A crackle of breath. “The discussion here is still going – I’ll let the others know when I can. Take care.”

“And you,” Cally said, signing off, and immediately hurried to the weapons console.

Avon met her gaze, seeing the same trepidation, determination and excitement reflected in her eyes that was speeding up his own heart. At least the waiting was over. “Ready?”

“Yes. Do we have a plan?”

“Lure the flotilla away and lose them?” Avon suggested with a sharp grin. “Zen, take us out of orbit, bearing 235.”

As Zen executed the manoeuvre, Cally called up the scanner data on her console. “Avon, what is the marked off area at bearing 532?”

“Zen only marks zones designated as dangerous. It shouldn’t affect our flight; I have removed _that_ subroutine for all cases except in those in which there is actual data to indicate that the ship will be destroyed.”

“But do we know why? Zen?”

“The designated zone is known Space Rat territory,” Zen responded promptly, even as it moved the _Liberator_ away from the planet.

“Space Rats?” Cally asked, but Avon barely heard her.

“Now there is an idea,” he murmured and instructed: “Zen, new flight path. Take us past that Federation flotilla – drop the detector shield long enough so they see us, make sure they follow us – and head straight for that zone.”

Zen confirmed.

“Who _are_ the Space Rats?”

“Pirates. Primitive, but very aggressive space farers. They like fast ships and _don’t_ like intruders. We lure the Federation in and get out again. The detector shield should help.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

“It’s _a_ plan. If it doesn’t work, we’ll think of something else.”

 

Zen took them close – terrifyingly close – to the flotilla. It wasn’t a very large gathering of ships – the Federation fleet had been depleted in the war – but it was still the largest assembly of Federation ships that had ever been on their heel.

The _Liberator_ rocked, barely avoiding a salvo of plasma bolts, while Avon and Cally could do nothing but hang on and hope for the best.

Avon had an anxious eye on the energy banks – as long as they didn’t need to open fire, they would be all right, but he daren’t lower the force wall. Coupled with their speed, the wall was a massive drain on their reserves, and if they ran out... Not that they would stand a chance, if it came down to a fight, even with full energy reserves.

But it was working.

The fleet had changed course, chasing after the _Liberator_ as one, and showed no sign of splitting up or pausing before the Space Rat zone. They were well in the zone when Zen reported that a pursuit ship had been destroyed – and another. Nothing had registered on their sensors, but evidently the Space Rats had arrived.

“Activate the detector shield! Take evasive manoeuvres and get us the hell out of here!”

 _Liberator_ changed course sharply, throwing Avon back into the seat, and they were shooting away.

They held their breath in tense silence for a while, expecting the Federation ships to break up, to chase after them – but instead they watched an increasingly heated battle develop between the Space Rats' ships – so fast they barely registered on the scanners before shooting out of range again, even to someone looking for them – and the bulk that was a Federation flotilla – until finally, they disappeared from even the long range scanners.

Avon pulled himself upright, shaking with the adrenalin reaction. “Zen, drop the force wall. Take us back to Destiny. Continue monitoring for other ships.”

“We got away with it!” Cally exclaimed with a rare wild grin.

“So it seems.” Avon rubbed his hands together, still shaking, still uneasy. “Let’s hope nothing went wrong in our absence.”

 

But of course something _had_ gone wrong.

Zen picked up Vila’s frantic – and largely incoherent – call when they were still too far away to do anything about it. They were too low on energy to go any faster, though Avon hurried down to the teleport immediately anyway.

Cally risked leaving the flight deck to Zen to prepare the medical unit – and then, when they were in orbital approach, hurried back through the teleport section to toss Avon a first aid kit and went on to the flight deck to monitor their approach.

It had only been a matter of minutes from when they heard Vila’s first call, but it seemed much longer. Avon had a fairly good idea who had been injured. Still, when he activated the controls just as Cally called down – “Blake, be ready to teleport now.” – and they arrived in a crouched huddle around his counterpart, it was a shock.

Vila’s face was tear-streaked. There was blood everywhere.

“What happened?!”

“I gave him something to slow bloodloss,” Mellanby said, as if that were any explanation.

Running steps signalled Cally’s arrival. She snatched up the medical kit, brushing Blake aside, even as Avon was still rising from behind the console.

Blake made space, looking white and shaken. Avon stared at him so he wouldn’t have to look at the body – _his body_ , his _counterpart’s_ body bleeding out on the floor.

“He was shot, shielding me,” Blake said. “We had to risk the teleport stress. Some assassin. They have her in custody, I think. I’ll have to go back down.”

 _Avon, Avon, can you hear me?!_ Cally’s telepathic voice sliced through his mind, erasing whatever he had meant to say. He sagged at the pain, falling against Blake, his vision blanking out for a moment.

“Cally,” he gasped, trying to regain some control, all sounds rushing into one in his ears.

She glanced up at him only for a second. “I’m sorry, River – give us a hand, we need to get him to the surgical unit.”

On autopilot, Avon stepped in to take his counterpart’s feet while Vila lifted under the shoulders, Cally hurrying along beside them. The wound was in his side, but there was no more bleeding – not that it was easy to tell in the bloody mess that were his clothes.

Once in the surgical unit, Cally had shooed all of them out, taking over as the medical computer listed treatment suggestions. Avon had taken Vila by the arm and pulled him out of the room and didn’t stop pulling until they stood in front of Vila’s cabin and Vila started to come out of the numbness of shock.

Vila shuddered violently, gagged dryly once and slumped against the door. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”

“Vila!” Avon shook him. “Open your door. Shower. Change. Cally will handle it.”

Vila looked at him with such hope and fear intermingled in his eyes that Avon couldn’t bring himself to let even an ounce of his own concern show. “But…”

Avon squeezed his shoulders again. “You’ll only be in the way down there. Keep warm. Eat. Then you can go back and check on them.”

Vila’s hand suddenly clasped painfully around his arm. “Stay.”

“No.” Avon shook the hand off. It was one of the most difficult things he had ever done. “Blake has gone back down. I need to be on the planet.” He paused, then released Vila’s shoulders, stepping out of reach. “Whatever happens, Vila,” he said, with meaning, and when Vila finally, finally, blinked, nodded, and straightened, he turned and ran back to the teleport section.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're rapidly nearing the close of this not-so-little tale - just a bit more to go. So here's another quick reminder that if you enjoy my work, feel free to find me on [my tumblr](https://castielslight.tumblr.com/), or make use of the "Subscribe" function here on AO3; there's plenty more B7 in the works. And of course, as always, I enjoy hearing from you in the comments!

On the planet, mercifully, everything was under control.

The assassin had been stunned in the fight and was still out, though that didn’t stop a rebel in Destiny’s local wear from holding her at gunpoint. Someone had removed her arm – a nasty joke of a prosthesis, functional only as a gun, not as a limb. Mellanby was examining it with morbid interest – she’d come straight back down with Blake, and there was blood drying on her clothes.

Avon tore his gaze away and stepped up to Blake, who was absently chewing on his knuckle, staring at the unconscious woman. At least the blood was only on his clothes.

“What do you want to do with her?” Avon asked him.

Blake shook his head. “We can’t leave her here. Mellanby’s group might be able to do something with her, deprogram her.”

“You don’t think she’s a Federation plant?” Avon was never going to assume that someone _couldn’t_ be a Federation agent again.

But Blake shook his head. “She was screaming about Albian after the shot. I think she’s a survivor – her grief twisted by the Federation. They have turned people into weapons before. And Albian was our responsibility.”

Blake’s voice was even, without blame or reprimand, but Avon felt the planet’s name like being drenched in icy water. Suddenly, it was doubly important that his counterpart should be all right – if something happened to him because of something Avon had failed to do… Avon might not forgive himself. “Albian.”

“Yes.” Blake glanced at him. “It was no fault of yours.”

“Oh no. You don’t have a monopoly on guilt, Blake. We _all_ failed to save that planet.”

“Let’s just hope that they don’t pay for our failure.”

Avon didn’t need to ask who he meant. He nodded his agreement. Distantly, he thought that this, just maybe, was the end of his argument with Blake about their staying, but he didn’t feel much like bringing it up now, not even to be able to say _I told you so_. He doubted that it would have felt very satisfying. “We should get back to the ship. The meeting was over, I take it?”

“Yes.” Blake dropped his arm, squaring his shoulders. “Thanks to Vila. It felt like a victory, for a short while. Are you all right?” he added, seeing Avon’s frown.

“Didn’t you hear…?” Just at the edge of his awareness – _Avon… Avon…_ “Oh, it’s Cally!” Her telepathic call wasn’t exactly painful over the distance, but now that he focussed on it, it became far clearer than it should have been.

“Talking to your counterpart?” Blake asked, just an edge of hopefulness in his voice.

“Calling him. Something’s wrong, Blake.”

Avon had never wanted so much to be wrong, but when Cally brought them up hours later, after increasingly frantic calls, her face was set in stone. They arrived in the medical unit to a Vila huddle on a chair, his shoulders shuddering with silent tears and Avon – his Avon – not waking up from the anaesthesia.

 

They set a rotating watch at the sick bed. Cally didn’t want other-Avon left alone – she didn’t say, but Avon knew that it was in case he got worse, in case they had to call Vila quickly so he could say his goodbyes. Not that Vila was very willing to leave the medical unit at all, but he had to bow to exhaustion – and the force that was Cally.

 Mellanby pointed out that she knew neither Avon particularly well and opted to deal with the assassin instead. They didn’t dare hang about in orbit much longer, and someone had to watch her, too. It was a sensible enough suggestion, though Avon would cheerfully have volunteered to do it – Cally had even said that it wouldn’t matter to his counterpart who was with him, just the presence and perhaps the voice of another person might help – but Vila had vetoed that. He could barely look at Avon, but he had still insisted that he’d take one of the shifts. Avon couldn’t tell him no.

It was Cally who ultimately decided that Avon should take a half-shift and spend the rest of his waking hours monitoring the ship and holding watch on the flight deck. Zen could handle the automatic operations and flight, but they were still on the lookout for Federation ships. The flotilla, at least, seemed to still be tied up in Space Rat territory, and there was no indication that anyone had noticed the happenings on Destiny. They had been lucky – apparently, no one was inclined to follow up on the signal the would-be assassin had sent. The presence of _Liberator_ where they had lost the flotilla was creating some attention – probably they were wondering whether Blake had made a deal with the Space Rats and established a base in their territory. It needn’t concern them – they had long left that sector of space behind. And so, Avon couldn’t shake the feeling that Cally had wanted him away from the medical unit for his own mental balance, not that she had said anything. But if anyone had noticed his reaction to seeing his counterpart in the comatose state, it would have been her.

His half-shift was wedged between Blake and Cally’s. He’d stand watch on the flight deck first, then relieve Blake, who took over flight deck watch, and then be relieved by Cally, at which point Avon made sure that he was as far away from the medical unit as he could be. Cally thought telepathy might help reach his counterpart and it still gave Avon a headache, though at least it wasn’t quite as debilitating as it had been at the start. Either Cally had learned to focus it better, or he was getting used to it. If he was lucky, he could sleep through it, though he had to curl up on a cot in Computer Control 5 to do it.

Of course, it also meant that he was avoiding Vila. Neither Blake nor Cally would let him stay in the medical unit beyond his shift, though Vila was nearly impossible to drive away. Avon wouldn’t have tried, didn’t feel he had the right – but Vila never showed up during his shift, and Avon found it only fair that he should stay out of Vila’s sight. It couldn’t be easy, seeing him – perhaps Vila didn’t even blame Avon for Albian, but Avon didn’t want to remind him by walking around, healthy and as well as he had been lately, when Vila might lose everything.

Despite it all, even the short time spent in the medical unit was more than uncomfortable. Avon didn’t know what to say to the silent spectre on the medical bed, the man who was him and yet was very much not. It wasn’t that he could expect a response – the computer reported his condition as stable, frustratingly unchanging – so he supposed it didn’t matter much what he said. Still, every minute sitting in, or, more frequently, pacing the medical unit was setting his nerves on edge. He busied himself, sinking his teeth deep into working out how to get back to their universe. It wasn’t that he hoped there would be anything there that could help his counterpart – Vila had said their medical science hadn’t been more advanced than the _Liberator_ ’s medical unit – just that, if he worked it out, he could present Vila and his counterpart with it _when_ he woke up and see Vila happy. He didn’t dare speculate what would happen if his counterpart never woke up, but the possibility was in the back of his mind and never more so than when he stood in the medical unit.

“Avon.”

Avon turned at Cally’s soft voice and glanced at the time displayed on the nearest computer panel. “You’re early.”

“Only by a few minutes. Blake wants to talk to you about Nevin.”

Nevin – the assassin the Federation had sent, the woman responsible for this. Anger swelled up whenever he thought about her, but it faded just as quickly. If Blake was right – and it was looking ever more like he was – the woman had been a victim of the Federation, a pawn in their game, with no real agency in what she had done. Besides, as Avon knew, she had been aiming at Blake – she had probably not even known who it was that she had hit, and they had decided not to enlighten her.

Avon sighed. “All right.”

“He is with Mellanby now.”

Avon nodded and forced himself to walk out without casting a glance back. 

He met Blake and Mellanby in front of the empty cabin in which the woman was confined. He leant against the wall to talk to them, breathing through a new headache induced by Cally’s telepathy. “What is there still to discuss, Blake?”

“I wanted your opinion.”

“On what?”

“What we should do with her,” Mellanby said. “If it were me, I might want her killed, but if Blake is right...”

Avon raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s not up to me to decide.”

“Which is why I asked for an _opinion_ , Avon, not a decision,” Blake said with the diplomatic calm that always got on Avon’s nerves.

“She had her reasons, whether she was conditioned or not. You can’t expect me to blame her for that; most people who want to kill you have less personal provocation. It’s clear enough that the Federation have had their hands on her, so probably she was conditioned. If we condemn her, we have to condemn you, too, Blake.”

A dark shadow passed over Blake’s face. “I have condemned myself enough for what I did.”

“And you’re a fool. It was out of your control.”

“So you’d just let her go?” Mellanby asked. For all that she had become an experienced rebel leader, there was a hot-headedness to her that Avon thought might need cooling. It could be useful – or it could be dangerous.

“No,” he told her. “I said it’s not my decision to make. We can’t let her free if she might go back to wanting to kill Blake or run back to the Federation, and we are certainly not keeping her on board. If you have personnel in your organisation that might be able to handle her, that seems like our best option. But the decision should be Vila’s.”

“I’m not sure that Vila is up to making any decisions at the moment,” Blake said sympathetically.

“Nonetheless. His or Avon’s.”

“If he wakes up, you mean,” Mellanby added, voicing what Avon hadn’t dared. _If_ , indeed.

“What’s going on?” a new voice suddenly sounded at the end of the corridor, and they all spun around to see Vila, standing there as if called. His eyes flickered to the door behind them and dark anger the likes of which Avon had never seen on the Vila they had known settled on his features. “You’re talking about _her_ again.”

“We must decide what to do with her, Vila,” Blake said, oh so gently. The tone had about as much effect on Vila as it would have had on Avon. His frown only deepened.

“Must we?” he spat.

“Vila,” Avon said, drawing his gaze, and deliberately laid his hand on his _Liberator_ gun – with the assassin on board, they all went armed. “Do you want her dead?”

Vila stared at him, fully meeting his eyes for the first time in two days. His jaw worked. Then, his gaze and shoulders dropped. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. No matter what. Let her live.” Vila glanced up again, angry eyes fixing on Blake. “But I do want her gone, I want these discussions to stop, I don’t want to have to think or talk about her!”

“All right, Vila,” Blake said with a nod.

Vila just pivoted on his heels without another word and strode away, heading to the medical unit.

Avon lowered his hand off the gun. “Well, then.”

“We’ll take her down on Sarran,” Mellanby said. “I’ll find someone.”

“Thank you,” Blake said.

Avon winced as another call from Cally sliced through his head. “I’m going to my cabin to sleep. You should be on the flight deck, Blake – and you might as well set a course for Sarran now.”

Avon did return to his cabin and naturally found himself too wound up to sleep. Sleep had never been easy for him, and seeing his counterpart so still hadn’t made him more inclined to lie down and surrender consciousness. Too tired to work, he searched through his drawers, trying to locate the music cubes Orac had made for him a long time ago. He hadn’t used them often, but they were relaxing in their own way. He’d left them behind when he had gone with Grant, but he couldn’t remember where – and when he held them in his hand, he thought of a better use for them. Cally’s calls had stopped, and so Vila would be in the medical unit now. Perhaps it was for the best; Avon wasn’t sure whether he wanted any of the others to know about his taste in music. He found one of the portable players and headed back to the medical unit.

Vila was sitting close to the bed, staring through his hands at the floor. Avon almost turned around – it didn’t seem right to disturb him, but there was something other than the music that Avon had wanted to tell him – Vila had to know that Avon was on his side, after he had all but laid the assassin’s life in his hands earlier, but Avon wanted him to know that he was safe with Blake, too, whatever happened.

Avon stopped in the doorway. “Vila.” He resisted the urge to clear his throat. Vila didn’t look up. “Vila,” he tried again, “I…”

This time, Vila jumped as if startled and turned towards him. His expression and voice were flat. “Oh, it’s you.”

Avon cleared his throat after all, stepping carefully inside, but not coming too close. “About the argument you walked into, Vila.”

“Yeh?” He couldn’t have sounded less interested if he had tried.

“Blake wanted to convince you to stay, by all necessary means. He won’t be trying again,” Avon said, meaning it. He didn’t think Blake would ever bring it up again, after what happened, but even if he did, Avon did not intend to let him so much as try. It was strange, how his protectiveness towards Vila had extended to include the both of them – or perhaps it wasn’t. After all, self-preservation had always been one of his strongest instincts. Holding the wry smile back, Avon stepped closer and brought the music player out from behind his back. “Here. It’s…” He caught Vila’s gaze and suddenly couldn’t look at him. “The datacube has some of my favourites. It… might help.”

Vila reached out and took it, wrapping his fingers carefully around the player and drawing it back into his lap. “Thanks.”

The desolation in Vila’s voice was painful, and there was really nothing he could say. Avon nodded and turned to go.

Only Vila called him back. “Avon,” he said, and for a moment, Avon thought he wasn’t speaking to him.

Then the implications sank in and he forced himself to turn back. “Vila, there is no need…” He wouldn’t mind being _River_ for the rest of his life if it helped. He didn’t care that he still thought of himself consistently as _Avon_ , that he liked hearing his name in Vila’s voice – if his counterpart never woke up, he didn’t think he could bear having Vila call him Avon ever again.

Vila gave a little shake of his head, halting his protest. “Thank you,” he said, solemnly but firmly. “Really.”

His throat tight, Avon only nodded and made himself move, leaving them alone.

Back in his cabin, he had to force himself not to hurl his boots at the wall in helpless frustration. When he sank down onto the bed, he was asleep from exhaustion within moments.  

 

It was only because of that sleep that he happened to be in the medical unit with Cally when it happened. The computers noticed the signs long before they did, of course, and they almost missed it – Avon half out of the door, ready to leave the watch to Cally. But then the change came on more rapidly, and Avon noticed it over Cally’s shoulder the very moment the computer sounded a low noise signal. They were both back at this counterpart’s bed within seconds. Avon scanned the computer readout, almost disbelieving – his heart skipped and a weight seemed to fall of his shoulders. He felt suddenly years younger and would have laughed out loud if it hadn’t felt so inappropriate. His counterpart was awake.

Cally had rushed to clasp the other Avon’s hand and smiled when he blinked open his eyes. _Welcome back, Avon_ , she sent, and for once Avon didn’t mind the pain – though his counterpart’s faint grimace immediately brought an apologetic look onto Cally’s face. “I apologise, Avon. Take it slowly now. You’re safe.”

“Cally,” Avon said, and his counterpart’s gaze flickered to him – something in his gaze seemed like disappointment, and Avon hurried to continue, “call Vila.”

“Yes, of course.” Cally released other-Avon’s hand – he didn’t resist, didn’t seem to be capable of much movement at all yet, even his eyes drifting close periodically. Cally called the flight deck first – catching only Blake, who made no secret of his joy and relief and reported that Vila was asleep, patching her through to Vila’s cabin.

“Sorry to wake you, Vila, but you should come down to medical unit.”

 

There was no getting Vila from his partner’s side after that, Cally had to tend to his medical needs and Mellanby refused to leave Nevin unguarded except for the few hours that she slept, and so Avon found himself sitting on the flight deck with Blake, feeling strangely magnanimous. He had stopped believing that anything could turn out all right in this universe of theirs, but perhaps he had been wrong, after all. He hadn’t managed to quite isolate the command that would take them back to the other universe, take the two of them back home, but it didn’t seem to matter much – he was sure his counterpart would be able to fill in the missing elements.

There was a grin on Blake’s face that refused to fade, and Avon was rather afraid that his own face mirrored the smile. There didn’t seem to be anything to say, but Blake tried anyway.

“I’m glad,” he said.

Avon raised an eyebrow at him. “They won’t appreciate you taking some fairy tale notion to their relationship,” he commented, but it lacked any of his usual bite.

“We all are in need of a little hope sometimes,” Blake answered jovially, nearly laughing. “Even you, Avon.”

“ _Even_ me? Don’t you mean, none more so?”

This time, Blake did chuckle. “Your words, not mine.”

“You do realise why we need to let them leave now, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Blake said simply, and that was that.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one more chapter after this and a little epilogue! Enjoy, and as always looking forward to hearing from you!

There suddenly seemed to be no need for urgency. Cally was determined that other-Avon fully recover before they tried to take them back, and other-Avon thought it would be better to have as many people as possible on the ship when they attempted to jump, which meant waiting until Dayna had concluded her business on Sarran.

Avon couldn’t say that he minded. The atmosphere on the _Liberator_ was light, lighter than he could remember it ever being. He slept well, astonishingly so. Yes, the Federation was still out there, but the plans to manufacture and distribute the Pylene 50 antitoxin were progressing well and there were no indications that the Federation had any idea. If anything, they were still preoccupied by how much of their flotilla had been destroyed by the Space Rats. Avon didn’t feel sorry for drawing the Federation’s attention to the pirates – it seemed they were well able to defend themselves against the diminished Federation military force. Altogether, it felt as though they were on holiday, despite Blake’s insistence on tactical sessions.

For the most part, that was the only time Avon saw Vila – he tried to give the two of them space. He liked to think of Vila as a friend he wouldn’t lose even when they returned to their own universe, but his overriding concern was now with their happiness. It seemed less important that it would never be his – and if he had, one night, sat in his cabin, lifted a glass to his own Vila at the wall that separated their cabins and reminisced a little to the memory of his own thief, finding some release in tears for him and for Anna-who-never-was – well, nobody needed to know that. He might eventually be happy again, he thought, just as Vila had said.

Once they had arrived on Sarran, Avon took the opportunity of the others being off the ship for some quiet research and found himself strangely content. He knew he was still chasing his counterpart in his knowledge of the _Liberator_ ’s systems, but at least knowing that one of them had figured things out gave him the confidence that he would, too. Avon had never really thought of himself as someone who lacked confidence in his own competence, but it was reassuring to have some measure of proof, all the same. Now, he would have to see whether he could not surpass his counterpart. He’d gathered that they’d lost the _Liberator_ at some point – maybe Avon could manage to keep it.

The communicator chimed and Avon activated it absentmindedly. “What do you want, Blake?”

“Well now,” came an all too familiar voice, “I don’t think anyone ever mistook me for Blake before.” There was a smile in his counterpart’s voice – had been for days now, whenever they’d happened to speak to each other, or, more frequently, when Avon had passed by in the corridor to hear him speak to Vila. There was something melancholy about hearing his own voice infused with such unabashed happiness but Avon couldn’t bring himself to begrudge his joy.

He sighed, leaning back in his flight deck chair. “What is it?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. Blake is down at the base with Mellanby and Cally–”

“– went for a walk with Vila, yes, I know. I have a favour to ask.”

“Ask away.”

“You might already have taken it, but there is a chance it’s still where I found it.”

Avon’s curiosity was piqued. “Yes?”

“Don’t get excited – I was going to ask whether I could give them to Vila.”

“I don’t even know what it is, yet.”

“Right – of course. A pair of dice, ten-sided. I found them on the shelving unit at the back of the treasure room, in a little pouch.”

“Yes, I think I know where.”

“Do you mind?”

“Fetching them for you or gifting them to Vila?”

“Both,” his counterpart answered, sounding serious now, “but particularly the latter.”

“No.” Avon paused for a moment, considering. He wasn’t prone to random gifting – but he thought he could recognise a grand gesture when it came from himself. He’d brought Anna flowers when he’d figured out how to make them rich beyond their dreams – real flowers that had been devilishly expensive, in a little pot of soil with a silken ribbon. He sighed at the memory. “What are you planning?”

“Vila has got it into his head that he would like to be married.”

Avon choked on his breath and had to turn away from the console to cough.

There was a hiss of breath in the communicator – his counterpart had sighed. “Well, at least you’re not laughing.”

“No, I’m… sorry, it’s just…” Avon trailed off, shaking his head helplessly. “I can’t even say that I’m really surprised. He told me. That he’d proposed.”

“He hasn’t said anything since the fiasco on Destiny, but neither of us has many personal acquaintances back in our universe. If we are going to do it, it better be over here.”

“I understand.” And he did. He’d never really thought about marriage for himself, not even when he’d been dreaming about a future with Anna, but he thought that if he were to put himself through a ceremony like that, he’d rather do it with people he at least knew decently well. It seemed that for his counterpart – as for himself – that now amounted to the crew of the _Liberator_. “I’ll fetch the dice and bring you up to take them when I have them?”

“Yes,” his counterpart agreed and then, suddenly, in a rush, added: “You don’t suppose he’d say no?”

Avon smiled, empathising with the flash of worried uncertainty. “It was Vila’s idea in the first place, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Yes,” his counterpart said again, hesitatingly. “I suppose I’ll find out. Thank you.”

 

“Avon.”

Really, keeping watch on the as good as deserted _Liberator_ was turning out to be less relaxing than Avon had expected. He supposed he could be grateful that it wasn’t the Federation interrupting him so rudely, but he had only just brought his counterpart up so he could see Cally in the medical unit for a check-up before she went to get some sleep – he’d not even made it as far as the steps leading off the teleport unit. He returned to the console, activating the communicator. “What is it, Blake?”

“Bring Vila and myself up, would you?”

Avon could hear Vila grumble something in the background. It didn’t sound concerning, but Avon had expected Vila to be unreservedly happy – after all, one look at his counterpart’s face had told him all he needed to know about how the evening had gone.

“Something wrong?” he asked, setting the pickup coordinates.

“Nothing, except that I’m not letting Vila marry in the clothes he’s wearing now.”

Avon choked down his laughter for Vila’s benefit and brought them up, schooling his features into a pleasant smile. “Well?”

Vila glowered at him. “Don’t be smug. And don’t tell Avon we’re on board.”

Avon lifted his hands off the console in a gesture of mock innocence and caught Blake’s eye – Blake, who studied him, assessing.

“You better find something appropriate to wear, too, Avon,” Blake said, entirely straight-faced, and Vila burst out laughing.

 

Avon wouldn’t have put it beyond Blake to hurl him bodily into the clothing storage to pick out what passed for appropriate wear in Blake’s eyes, so in the end he decided to head him off. After a quick word with his counterpart, he picked out a simple enough affair of plain black. The fabrics were slightly more expensive than what he usually wore – and slightly more sensitive to destruction – but at least they gave the impression of being able to keep him warm even after the sun had set over the ceremony. Reluctantly, he went to the flight deck to consult with Cally. He didn’t think it mattered much what _he_ wore, but he wouldn’t put it past Blake to get offended if he didn’t at least put in some effort. The black had seemed… appropriate.

“What do you think?” he asked as he stepped onto the flight deck, carefully keeping his voice neutral.

Cally looked him over. “It suits you very well.”

“What I want to know is, will Blake force me to teleport back up to change when I show up like this to the ceremony?”

“No. It will be fine, Avon. It is probably best if none of us compete with the grooms.”

Avon snorted. “Do you know how ridiculous this all sounds?”

“I am not used to ceremonies of this kind. They have – had – gone out of fashion on Auron.”

Avon hadn’t meant to remind her of that. He leant on his console, suddenly feeling again the tiredness that had settled into his bones before he had come back onto the _Liberator_ – with everything that had happened since, he had almost been able to forget the weariness brought on by the deaths that lay in their past. He’d allowed himself the illusion that, perhaps, he had grieved enough, that he was able to move on. If only it had been so easy – clearly his subconscious had had other ideas, he thought as he ran a finger over the black sleeves. Inappropriate only that he should become aware of it again now, in the shadow of the unconcealed joy of Vila and his counterpart. “I’m sorry,” he said to Cally, “I didn’t mean to remind you of Auron.”

Cally stepped down from the central console to touch his arm, smiling slightly. “Everything reminds me of Auron, Avon. You have nothing to apologise for.” She stroked her fingers lightly over the fabric of his shirt, much as he had done a moment earlier. “It is a very lovely tunic. You should wear it more often, though we must see that you gain some weight and muscle – you have got very thin, Avon.”

“Yes, I suppose I have. Perhaps we should promise to take better care of each other?” he added, letting a wry smile play about his lips. “Somehow I doubt we will have much chance to rest. And things like these,” he plucked on the sleeve, “are not suited for rebellion.” Much as dwelling on the past would not get them anywhere. Carry on – _whatever happens_?

“I believe we shall win,” Cally said. “Do you?”

Avon thought carefully for a moment, studying her expression. He drew back, looking across the empty flight deck. “Yes, perhaps.” He didn’t elaborate – perhaps they would win, perhaps he believed. They couldn’t fool themselves that this was _their_ happy ending, as Blake seemed to be so willing to pretend. They were only borrowing, taking part in someone else’s happiness, and if there was something like it – not the same, it could never be the same – in their future – well, Avon was only certain that he worried about what might yet happen before then.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we come to the close! Enjoy the final chapter and the epilogue!

The ceremony was, on the whole, unremarkable. Avon was relieved to recognise at least something of his own tastes in the way his counterpart and Vila had chosen to symbolise their bond, even as he found it difficult to watch. It wasn’t that he didn’t wish them happiness, nor was he consumed by jealousy, if that was what his first reaction to their coming together had been – but it felt as though the situation, his conversation with Cally, even the look on Vila’s face now had all made him aware again that there was a wound there – a wound that had scabbed over, perhaps, not least because of Vila. But a wound nonetheless that still set off an ache in his chest when he saw Vila getting pair-bonded in the brilliant setting sun, so bright he could hardly look his way, and thought of a charred corpse in a dusty underground bunker.

He needed some time alone, afterwards, and set out for a long walk along the darkening beach. It was probably best that he was away when the alcohol inevitably started flowing, anyway. He thought about going back to the ship – perhaps to try and figure out how his counterpart had managed to programme the teleport for remote pickup. Then again, he had avoided coming down to Sarran so far and thought that the fresh air and the quiet would do him good. He could still hear the party in the distance, of course, but where he walked now, the sound of the smoothly rolling waves was audible again.

It wouldn’t be much longer: Everything was ready; they would likely be leaving in the morning. There really was no reason to put it off, they all knew that. And then, while the two of them would be out of it – back to the rebellion. Life on the _Liberator_ would never be the same as it had been, before, when Vila and Gan and Jenna had been with them, but the Cause hadn’t changed. Avon couldn’t really think of anywhere he’d rather be. Which was not to imply, he told himself firmly, that he _wanted_ to risk his life fighting the Federation now, though, knowing Blake, he would take it this way, if he had known what Avon was thinking. It was just that, for better or for worse, Avon’s options had narrowed down to one, and Avon didn’t find that one option so distasteful that he would contemplate any drastic measures. He wasn’t sure what he believed, not like Cally, always so sure of her convictions. But perhaps, if nothing else, he had gained the hope that what was a wound now would heal – scar, perhaps, but heal all the same, and that he could carry on, even if the only thing motivating him was spite. And if that was to be Vila’s last gift to him, Avon wouldn’t complain.

 

It was late when they finally returned to the _Liberator_ – so late that it was early. His counterpart and Vila had disappeared hours ago, a combination, Avon suspected, of age and the need to be with just each other, but that hadn’t stopped the rest of them. Most of Mellanby’s rabble hardly knew what they were celebrating in the first place, and Blake seemed determined to release some tension by all possible means, abiding in more alcohol than Avon had ever seen him consume. Blake, it seemed, could be a jolly drunk, and by the time they convinced him to teleport back on board, the sun had been rising over the dunes. If he hadn’t been so tired, Avon would have laughed when his counterpart tried to rouse them only a little while later to make the jump and was faced with bleary faces and Cally’s sensible suggestion to wait for a few hours.

Predictably, despite his tiredness, Avon couldn’t go back to sleep. He lay on the bed in his cabin, staring at the ceiling. Physically, he felt the exhaustion, but his mind was wide awake. Part of him wanted to get up, just to try and spend a few last hours in Vila’s company, well aware that in a few hours he would see the last of him. Even more aware that, if things went wrong, he would remain behind in this universe, stuck on the Wanderer, while the others bid their goodbyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree that it was necessary to replicate the original conditions of the jump as close as possible – just in case the Wanderer in close approach had been a factor in where the _Liberator_ had jumped – but the idea that he might not have a chance to say a proper goodbye filled him with dread. He should be aware, by now, that it wasn’t _his_ Vila, that nothing he said to the man would make any difference to the Vila that was dead – that, rationally, it shouldn’t make a difference to Avon, either, but a part of him didn’t seem to have got the message. And so he lay in the half-light, wondering whether there was anything he could give him, as a parting gift, as a wedding present, as if he really needed a reason – as if there was anything he could give Vila, as if they had many personal possessions in the first place.

Avon sat up suddenly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. Perhaps there was something, after all.

 

The jump to a different universe wasn’t any more noticeable the second time, even though Avon had been prepared and waiting for it. If it hadn’t been for Cally’s voice contact, querying whether everything was all right on his end, Avon wouldn’t have known it had happened. With a sigh, he directed the Wanderer back into dock, dreading what was to come. He really hadn’t wanted to say his goodbyes in front of the others – it wasn’t as though Cally and Blake didn’t know, by now, how he had felt about losing Vila, but he wasn’t given to public displays of emotion. He was afraid that his need for privacy would cost him his only chance to say what needed to be said.

He carefully gathered up the few tools he had left on the Wanderer. There was a roll of computer probes and the monitoring equipment that might or might not give him some data about the jump – its secondary data cube he left lying on the pilot’s chair. Let his counterpart do with the data what he liked. The docking procedure completed on autopilot, Avon waited for the airlock to cycle and crossed the short connection tunnel back onto the _Liberator_. He had little reason and no desire to look back.

To his surprise, when the door opened on the other end, Vila was there, alone.

“All shipshape and ready?” Vila asked, with a grin that was just a little too shaky.

“Yes,” Avon said, setting down the box of equipment. “Where is everyone?”

“They’ll be down in a minute.” Vila laid his hand on Avon’s arm. “Avon…”

Avon turned to him, unable to look him in the eye, but equally unable to shake off the light touch. “This is goodbye.”

“You could come visit,” Vila said, but they both knew that they might never again jump across universes – that it might be better if they didn’t. The universes weren’t meant to be entangled. Vila’s tone was light, but Avon had learned to read him better than that – he could sense the pain and the sympathy beneath it.

Avon turned to pick up the data reader from where it had sat on top of the tools, offering it to Vila.

“What’s this?” Vila switched the reader on. His lips pressed together the moment the screen cleared to his image from the Federation records.

“It’s the last copy of your Federation file in existence in this universe. It’s possibly also the last photograph, not that it is very flattering,” Avon explained quietly, fighting to keep his voice steady. “I don’t think I should have the right to decide what becomes of it, so… I can’t claim it’s a gift, Vila.” His hand reached out for the reader almost out of its own volition, and Avon forced it back to his side. “I… don’t think it would be good to keep it, but I can’t bring myself to reformat the reader; the information is nowhere else, I had Orac wipe the records after I’d made the copy. If anyone has the right to make a decision about what happens to the data, it’s you.”

Vila switched the screen off again, cradling the reader close to his chest and catching Avon’s gaze. “Are you sure? You… you hung on to Anna’s photograph for years.”

Avon felt his lips curl into something that got stuck between a smile and a grimace. “I did, didn’t I? Look where it got me.” He shook his head. “That Vila was never mine. Perhaps he could have been, if… he hadn’t died,” he said in a rush, swallowing hard, “but either way I have no more right to him than I do to you.”

Vila reached out again, but his hand stopped short of Avon’s arm.

Avon looked down at it, then smiled sadly up at Vila’s face. “Perhaps I was even presumptuous to mourn him the way I have, more concerned about my lost opportunities than about who he was.” He shrugged. “I never claimed not to be selfish, but I know I don’t have the right to make this decision; if I am forced to it won’t end well. Perhaps I didn’t have the right to read it in the first place. Take it, Vila, and do with it as you think best. I think it’s about time that I remembered him the way we actually knew each other and let go of the what ifs.”

Vila nodded heavily and shoved the reader into the bag he’d brought. Then, in one jerky movement, he pulled Avon into a terse hug. Avon could feel him shaking, but when he pulled back, there was only a little shine in his eyes. “I’ll take care of it, Avon.”

“Thank you,” Avon replied, feeling something uncurl inside of him.

“Can I ask you to do something for me?” Vila asked, with a sudden quirked grin that Avon wanted to seal forever in his memory. “As a wedding gift, if you like?”

Avon didn’t even hesitate. “Of course. Anything.”

Vila’s face grew instantly serious. “Take care of yourself, Avon. Promise me, whatever happens.”

“I did. I do, I will. Yes, Vila.”

“Good,” Vila said, stepping back from him. “And while you’re at it,” he added, smirking, “look out for the others, too, would you? They need someone with some common sense sometimes.”

Despite himself, Avon smiled. “I shall try my very best. Vila –” he said, just to speak the name to him a final time, “thank you.”

After that, there was really nothing more to say. Avon’s counterpart arrived first, finding them calmly waiting, though Avon had no doubt that he saw more than he let on, and the others followed shortly, beginning an awkward ritual of goodbyes. Unexpectedly, Avon found himself taken by the arm by his counterpart and pulled away from the others.

“Don’t look at me like that,” other-Avon said, “I’m not going to ask what you told Vila, or what he told you. And if Blake asks, tell him you came up with them yourself.”

“Came up with what?”

“Teleport implants – subcutaneous bracelet replacements. I left a prototype or two – you’ll find them. You have to work out the injector yourself, but what’s there should be enough to let you figure out how they work. From experience – the bracelets are too easy to lose and far too obvious.”

“Yes, I was thinking–”

His counterpart shook his head, interrupting, “I never got around to developing it when it mattered, so I’m giving you a head start. Let’s say I forgot to put the prototypes away when we left.”

“All right.”

The other Avon scanned his face for a moment. “It it?” He lowered his gaze in a semi-nod. “Yes, I think you _do_ understand why we couldn’t tell you more.”

“I won’t hold it against you if it turns out you made things worse,” Avon said, only half joking, and was treated to a brilliant grin.

“Good. Take care of yourself.” His counterpart dropped his hand from Avon’s elbow and stabilised himself with his stick. He glanced over their shoulders, his gaze locking on Blake. “And watch him. Keeping him alive is a tall order, but at least don’t shoot him yourself.”

Avon thought that repeating that he had no intention of shooting Blake would do little good. Instead, he just nodded and watched as his counterpart returned to Vila’s side.

“Blake,” Avon himself said, raising his voice over Vila’s babbling. He was already standing at the exit and Avon didn’t think he could take watching them leave.

Blake looked over at him, acknowledging the call of his name.

“I’ll go to the flight deck to oversee the undocking,” Avon told him. He glanced over, caught Vila’s gaze one last time, and then, not waiting for confirmation or permission, turned on his heels and headed back up to the flight deck, deliberately taking the route by which he had first boarded the _Liberator._

It seemed appropriate to fresh starts.


	18. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in case anyone gets confused: By the way of epiloguing both this story and BDaS, this is the *only* chapter in this entire fic that is told from the perspective of the Avon whose point of view we have in BDaS, rather than "River" Avon, who narrates the rest of NTtS.

Avon woke up to a lack of Vila – or perhaps because of a lack of Vila. His hand was already reaching searchingly for the spot on the bed where Vila should have been before he was truly awake to register what was wrong. Vila’s space was still warm, he hadn’t been gone long, but it was the middle of the night. Avon could see the bathroom from here – no light.

Aching, reluctant to move, Avon shifted onto his back, riding out the flare of pain with clenched teeth. It had been a bad couple of days – the turn of the weather towards winter was catching him out, even in the perfectly climate controlled domes. It was as if something in the atmosphere had changed. He knew it would probably get worse as he got older and his joints stiffer; he had been warned that he might lose his ability to walk altogether. Vila had been shocked at that news, even though they had, of course, been guaranteed access to the best assistive technology available. Avon couldn’t bring himself to care too much as long as Vila was _there_ to be shocked.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” came Vila’s quiet voice. He was sitting at the workstation, wrapped in a robe.

There was a downside, Avon thought, to owning one’s own planet – no one else quite kept the same hours as oneself. “What’s going on?”

“A message.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Make them wait, whoever it is. I’m cold.”

Vila chuckled. “If only I’d known you could be like this all those times you told me to _quit whining, Vila!_ ”

Avon tugged at the blankets, trying to conserve warmth. It was a pointless attempt – he knew he would only truly feel warm when Vila came back to bed. “What’s the message?”

Vila glanced back at the console. “I think it’s from River.”

Of all the things he could have said, that was probably the only one that would have jolted Avon fully awake. “River?” He had spared his alter ego – that entire universe – a thought every now and again in the past years, when he wasn’t too busy with their own universe. He had hoped things had gone well, but at the same time he hadn’t wanted to check. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know if it had gone badly. “Are you sure?”

“It came in on a strange carrier wave, non-standard. BLAKE can’t isolate the source, but the closest equivalent–”

“– is the data we had on the Wanderer?”

“Yes. Also there was something in the message – something he promised me.”

“He’s alive, then, and at liberty to send a message.” Avon sighed, bracing himself. “What does he say?”

“ _It’s over_. _The Leaders of the Free Council of the Federated Planets, Cally of Auron, Dayna Mellanby, Zeeona of Betafarl, Tara and Del Nevin, and Kerr Avon, send their greetings. Vila – whatever happens._ ”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“No mention of Blake.”

Vila didn’t smile, his lips pressing together. “I noticed that. Do you think…”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

“River doesn’t say,” Vila argued, but his voice rang hollow. He abandoned the desk and slipped back into bed, seeking closeness, entwining their fingers.

Avon squeezed his hand. “Blake was always prepared to die for his cause.” Supressed fear was making his voice shake – he could only hope that Blake _had_ died for his cause and not through… other means.

Vila clung to his hand in turn, his grip almost bruising. “Can we send a message back? Find out what happened?”

“Possibly, and we will send a message back – but I don’t think we ought to know.” Avon let his head fall onto Vila’s shoulder, releasing a sigh. “Leave them to their peace, Vila. What does it matter?”

Vila exhaled heavily, not relaxing his grip. “Tara Nevin.”

“The would-be assassin.”

“Didn’t think you’d remember her name.”

“She nearly killed me. I remember her name.” Avon breathed in silence for a moment, running his thumb over Vila’s skin as Vila’s grip finally, slowly relaxed. “She became a revolutionary then.”

“Yes. Del?”

“Grant, or Tarrant?” Avon asked, following Vila’s line of thinking. “Though Tarrant doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to give up his name on marriage, you?” He smiled faintly. Remembering the dead had become easier, over the years. “It’s too common a name, either way. We might not know him at all.”

“And Cally and Zeeona and Dayna. And you – other you.”

“It should be an interesting political leadership, if nothing else.”

“At least it’s not all Alphas.”

“Yes.”

“I wish he’d told us more.”

“It’d had to have been a one tick pulse signal. The data capacity is very limited, unless he used complex compression, and there is no guarantee that our systems would be able to unscramble that. There might be differences we never noticed when we were there, and more might have appeared in the meantime. With no real compression, this was probably the most they could send.”

“What are we sending back?”

“If their government is anything like ours was: _Good luck_ ,” Avon said. “They’ll need it.”

“Yes.” Vila curled his arm around him, breathing a kiss on Avon’s hair. “And: _thank you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we have it! Thanks you for sticking with me through this, and, especially since reader requests were my primary impetus for writing this in the first place, I hope you enjoyed it. I look forward to reading your comments! 
> 
> Finally, if you want to read more of my works and support me, you can find plenty of B7 and Avon/Vila in my AO3 profile, with more to come soon - so feel free to subscribe, and I always enjoy receiving comments, no matter how old the work! And if you want to find me elsewhere, I am currently most active on [my tumblr](https://castielslight.tumblr.com/).


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